Loentje Furnée met kinderen op het strand van Noordwijk 1930

Carolina Onnen's beach photographs are pinned to the backing board of an album, a collection of visual notations. Imagine the artist, squinting into the sun, arranging her family on a beach. A mother and children are grouped together, the children sit together in a row, a child hangs upside down from gymnastic bars. In each photograph, the tones range from warm to cool greys, punctuated by the white of the paper. I think about how Onnen frames these different groupings of people, experimenting with perspective and light. The formal constraints of the photograph—the borders and edges—offer a structure for her to play with. The artist has fixed these images to the page, an exchange of ideas across time. It reminds us that all artists participate in an ongoing conversation, inspiring one another’s creativity, one snapshot at a time.