Groepsfoto Possibly 1935

Here we have an anonymous photograph, mounted in an album, a little under postcard size. I look at this image and I think about the group, all together. I think about their relationships to one another, like the painting is a form of ‘social relations’ of those who are standing for the photograph. The neutral tones seem so calm, but they're also full of suppressed emotion and tension. I feel this tension through the photograph. The artist may have been thinking about their own relationships, as they took the image, deciding who to include, who to exclude. I wonder if they knew that they were doing. Were they even trying? Ultimately, the success of this image is that it manages to capture the complexity of human emotion, in all its messy and contradictory forms. It reminds us that we are all connected.