Blik op en vanaf hotel Selighof, en Eugen Wachenheimer aan het praten met oom Stephan, april 1933, Baden-Baden 1933 - 1934

This is a page from a photo album, probably made by a member of the Wachenheimer family in April 1933. It's a collection of three photographs of the Selighof hotel in Baden-Baden, Germany. The photos, framed by the album's dark grey page, document not just a place but a moment in time. The textures of the photographic paper create a tactile connection to the past, each print a small window into a world now gone. Look closely at the middle image, where two figures stand in conversation. The way the light catches them, the subtle grain of the photograph, all contribute to a sense of intimacy. The album page has some writing that looks like an annotation, like a painter's note on a preparatory sketch, and that is what we see here, a moment in time documented and reflected on. These images create a sense of a shared experience that feels so human, it might remind you of the work of Gerhard Richter, or even a more domestic version of Boltanski's archive. In art, as in life, meaning is often found in the fragments, in the spaces between what is seen and what is felt.