Eugen Wachenheimer, zittend in een tuin in Baden-Baden, 1913 1913

This photograph of Eugen Wachenheimer, sitting in a Baden-Baden garden, was taken in 1913 by an unknown photographer, and there’s a curious kind of casualness to the image, as though it’s a snapshot lifted from real life. The sepia tones, the way the light falls, it all feels rather hazy, like a memory. The picture plane is soft, almost unfocused, and the tonal range—from the darks of the foliage to the pale sky— adds to that sense of dreamy ambiguity. Look at the way Wachenheimer is perched on the grass, his gaze directed elsewhere, almost as though he’s been caught unawares. The surface of the photograph, with its subtle imperfections and fading, only adds to the sense of time passing, of memory fraying at the edges. It makes me think of Gerhard Richter’s blurred photographs. They share this sense of transience, this gentle meditation on the nature of time. It makes you wonder: what was he thinking, what was he looking at, and what does any of it mean?