Gezicht op een bosrijk gebied tegen een berghelling in de Harz c. 1903 - 1908

This gelatin silver print by Geldolph Adriaan Kessler captures a wooded landscape in the Harz region. The image has emerged through the artist’s darkroom practice, shifting and solidifying through chemistry and process, a kind of alchemy. I’m thinking about Kessler out there in the landscape, lugging equipment up that mountain, searching for a composition. What was he thinking as he framed this view, a dense forest leading up to a craggy rock face? He’s really captured the depth of field here. The trees in the foreground are in focus and then everything else sort of softens and fades as it moves into the distance. Look at the way the light catches the edges of those rocks. It reminds me of the Hudson River School painters who were trying to capture the sublime in nature. Kessler is also after something powerful and elusive here. All artists are in conversation, picking up threads across time and place. Painting, like photography, is a form of embodied expression, embracing ambiguity and uncertainty. There’s no single reading of a landscape like this, and that's where its power lies.