Marba Titzenthaler, dochter van de fotograaf, in zandbak op het dakterras van het woonhuis in de Friedrichstrasse, Berlijn Possibly 1915 - 1916

This is Waldemar Titzenthaler's photograph of his daughter, Marba, on the rooftop of their Berlin home. It’s a small silver gelatin print, likely made around the 1920s, and right away you can tell that Titzenthaler wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. I love the way the image is structured, how the rough texture of the wall meets the smooth skin of Marba’s arm. Everything about the photo seems immediate and intuitive, an exploration of form, texture, and light, rather than a polished composition. The grittiness in the photograph feels really intentional, as if Titzenthaler embraced the inherent qualities of the medium. He's not hiding anything – the sand, the wall, the child's clothes, all rendered in similar tones, with a rough, tactile quality that gives the picture a sense of honesty. The image reminds me of the raw, unvarnished quality of some of August Sander's portraits, a contemporary of Titzenthaler. Both artists are concerned with truth and reality, even as photography plays with these ideas. They show us how art can be a conversation, where artists build upon each other's ideas and challenge our expectations of what a photograph can be.