Onbekende vrouw 1941 - 1942

Curator: Here we have a fascinating gelatin silver print from 1941-42 titled "Unknown Woman" by P. Brandsma. It's presented in a kind of photo album format. Editor: Wow, what strikes me is the quiet intensity. It's not just one image, is it? It feels like a triptych from a life lived indoors, outdoors, and then… a gathering near the sea. Curator: Precisely. We see an arrangement of images depicting everyday scenes. The top left photograph depicts a woman seated at a desk speaking on the telephone in what appears to be an office environment with a world map hanging on the wall, while the upper right shot shows a woman outside, possibly by the door of a stately house with a bird perched on her shoulder. Then below we have an image of women gathered near a coast, or river. Editor: That bird perched on her shoulder gives her such an enigmatic, almost surreal aura! It reminds me a bit of a modern-day fairytale... I'm immediately creating a backstory for her...she's waiting for instructions... Curator: It’s the photographic equivalent of genre painting, isn't it? Each image captures a moment typical of the era, yet infused with this powerful sense of history unfolding around the subjects. Brandsma’s composition makes use of realism to capture snapshots from life during that time. Editor: Absolutely! But it also begs questions about the woman in each photograph: Were all these scenes the story of just one person? Was it documenting specific labor or social conditions? What story is being told through the sequence of images and where does the bird fit? It’s both grounded and slightly ethereal, especially that contrast between the working interior and the mysterious exterior scene. Curator: The composition and arrangement suggests a story but perhaps Brandsma deliberately refrains from being prescriptive, allowing us as viewers to consider history and photography as memory in the making, always fragmented. Editor: I like that. We’re all just filling in the gaps with our own imagined memories. These could be snapshots of anyone's experience of 1940s life and society. The gaps left in the album itself create this invitation to engage in storytelling, I wonder whether they had others that fell out. Curator: A potent reminder of history’s incompleteness. It allows our contemporary perspective to colour and, in a sense, create that history in its reception, in this moment. Editor: A story suspended in silver, indeed.