Boslandschap, mogelijk in Zuid-Afrika 1967 - 1971

Willem Jacob van den Berg made this photograph of a landscape, possibly in South Africa, on an unknown date. The muted, soft palette gives the scene a dreamlike quality, blurring the line between memory and reality. The trees, rendered with a gentle focus, invite you to touch them, to feel the rough texture of their bark. A particular stand of trees draw the eye, their thin trunks reaching skyward, creating vertical lines that break the horizontal expanse of the land. The mountain in the background looms like a fortress, but its sharp edges are softened by a haze, obscuring the specifics of the process through a lack of clarity. This piece reminds me of early landscape photography, before the technology developed for images to be crystal clear, echoing the work of photographers like Carleton Watkins, who captured the vastness of the American West with a similar sense of awe and wonder.