Twee jongetjes 1900 - 1922

Robert Julius Boers made this photograph, Twee jongetjes, sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. It is a stereo card, so essentially two images of the same scene taken at slightly different angles and mounted side by side to give a three-dimensional effect when viewed through a special viewer. What strikes me is the tonal range; the image is almost entirely sepia-toned, variations of brown, giving it a hazy, dreamlike quality. It’s as if we’re looking back through time, or into a memory. The texture is smooth, almost velvety, which softens the edges and gives the whole scene a gentle feel. Look closely at the way the light catches on the boys’ white clothes and the dusty road. There’s a certain ambiguity here, a sense of a moment captured and preserved, but also a reminder of the distance between then and now. It reminds me a little of the work of early photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron, who were more interested in mood and atmosphere than sharp focus. Art, like memory, is often about embracing the blur.