Oud bivak bij Telong 1903 - 1913

This photograph, Oud bivak bij Telong, by an anonymous artist, has a beautiful tonal scale, it feels immediate, like a sketch. It gives us so much information through these subtle darks and lights. The eye is drawn through the image by the road, into the distance, but the surface is far from smooth. It is pockmarked, broken, and uneven. The landscape contains all of the human activity, the buildings and the figures, but it is far from tamed. I keep finding my eye pulled back to the small dark triangular forms of the roofs on the right of the frame, how they seem to nestle back into the treeline. Thinking about the work of someone like Bernd and Hilla Becher, these kind of documentary images have such an objective appearance, but of course any act of looking is subjective. What this artist chose to frame, how they composed the image, this tells us so much. The picture is an invitation for us to imagine this place.