Weg te Soengeiliat 1900 - 1922

This stereograph, Weg te Soengeiliat, was made by Robert Julius Boers. The sepia tones give the whole image a kind of uniformity, but also an ambiguity. Look at how the details, the shadows in the trees or the texture of the building, are almost lost in this brown haze. It feels like one of those memories that's both vivid and hazy all at once. There's the path right in the foreground, very simply rendered, which leads our eye into the heart of the composition, and that small house in the background which is so clearly defined, but also somehow lost, just visible through the dense trees. It is interesting how a photograph can almost be like a painting, with the focus and the haze becoming like strokes of the brush, creating depth. I'm reminded of the work of Camille Corot, who could also find abstraction in representation and vice versa. It's funny how art keeps talking to itself across time, isn't it?