Ob. Wm. Meyer op straat 1941 - 1945

This small black and white photograph captures an anonymous figure, likely taken with a simple camera, sometime in the past. The greyscale lends an air of timelessness, but also a sense of distance, like a memory fading at the edges. There’s this figure in uniform, walking with books – so many questions arise! The composition has this interesting tension; the subject is off-center, almost caught mid-stride. I keep wondering about the person frozen in time, their story, their relationship to the photographer, the intention or accident of the photograph. The surface is matte, worn, with the jagged edges of a photograph that has been handled and kept. It reminds me a bit of early Gerhard Richter pieces, where the blurriness and imperfection become part of the work's emotional power. We look at it now, and it's a fragment, an open-ended question about history, identity, and the fleeting nature of existence.