Landschap met sneeuw en ijs bij landgoed Meijenbeek bij Voorst (landschappen) 1900 - 1930

This small photo by Richard Tepe captures a landscape with snow and ice near Voorst. Can you imagine Tepe out there in the cold, composing this shot? The monochromatic palette really sets the scene. It makes me think about the materiality of photography - the way light hits the emulsion, the subtle gradations of tone he coaxes out of the landscape. Look at the cracked ice in the foreground. It’s so immediate, almost tactile. You can see the texture and feel the cold. I wonder what he was thinking about as he framed the image. There's a real stillness to the composition, but that belies the dynamism of the scene. He's capturing a moment of transformation, where solid turns to liquid, and the world is in flux. That reminds me of the work of other landscape artists like Caspar David Friedrich, but Tepe’s approach is totally his own. That’s the funny thing about art, right? We’re all out here, wrestling with similar ideas, but we all see things in our own unique way.