Twee foto's van de familie Van den Berg en een gezicht op de Amstel 1923 - 1924

This is a photo album page featuring two snapshots by Hendrik Herman van den Berg. Look at the way these images, most likely captured with a simple camera, invite a kind of casual, immediate seeing. In the top picture, the family sits on a donkey cart in a park, all captured in a straightforward manner. The texture is almost grainy, with a narrow range of tones, and the light is soft, lacking strong contrast. In the second, a view of the Amstel River is presented with a similar lack of adornment. It’s the kind of image that feels very specific to a time, but also sort of timeless, you know? The beauty here is the simplicity, where each element contributes to the overall mood, and in that way, it reminds me of the work of someone like Eugène Atget, who also had a knack for finding the extraordinary in the ordinary. In the end, art is about how we see, and these pictures offer us a very direct, unpretentious view of the world.