Portret van een jonge vrouw 1901 - 1919

Henri de Louw made this photograph, Portret van een jonge vrouw, but we don't know when. It’s a small gelatin silver print, kind of faded, and mounted in a larger album page. I like how it makes me think about how photographs age, change, and fade, becoming something other than they were originally. The original photographer probably made this as a super-precise thing, but now it’s kind of a mess, softened through time. The face is a profile, almost like a classical cameo. The tones of the image are like an old memory, softened, like an Impressionist painting, even. It reminds me of the way that Gerhard Richter used out-of-focus snapshots as the basis for paintings. The ambiguity becomes the point, and the softness invites you to project into it. What do you see when you look at her?