Afrikaanse baobab en twee zebra's in Makuleke, Zuid-Afrika 1968

These photographs of a baobab tree and two zebras in Makuleke, South Africa, were taken by Willem Jacob van den Berg, most likely with a simple camera, at some point in his life. The snapshot aesthetic feels very casual, like turning the pages of a family album. There's something about the faded colours and the way the images are presented, mounted on a blue page, that reminds me that photography is, first and foremost, about memory and lived experience. You can almost smell the dust and heat of the African landscape. I’m drawn to how the colours work together. The bleached sky of the upper image meets the golden, late-afternoon sun in the zebra photo. It makes me think about how our lives and encounters are like snapshots, fleeting moments we try to capture and hold onto, whether it’s through art, photography, or just a good story. It’s like the photographer is saying, "I was here, I saw this, and now you can too." Much like the work of the contemporary artist Wolfgang Tillmans, these images encourage us to look closer at the ordinary and find the extraordinary within it.