Isabel Wachenheimer voor een open raam in de woning van de familie Wachenheimer c. 1932 - 1937

This is Isabel Wachenheimer pictured by her family in a photograph taken at home. It's a double exposure, with her featured twice in two adjacent frames. There's a starkness to this work, even in its domesticity. The gray scale is so complete that it almost feels like a drawing in charcoal or graphite, a rendering of tonal values, of dark and light, in their most absolute form. Look at the window frames, how their verticality and horizontality make firm and certain delineations across the space, and how Isabel’s body echoes this uprightness. But then her posture is ever so slightly off-kilter in both panels, a gentle leaning, as if the certainty of this structure is maybe just a little too much to bear. It makes me think of Sophie Calle, her use of photography to make portraits of people she knew or happened to meet, to create a sense of selfhood through something almost forensic. Both artists use images as documents of a life lived, in all its specificity and unknowability.