Station van Bireuen 1903 - 1913

This photograph, titled "Station van Bireuen," was made by an anonymous artist. It captures a bustling marketplace near a train station, likely using a large format camera with a long exposure. The charm lies in the gray scale tones and the way the photograph has been built up layer by layer. The details accumulate to create an environment that suggests the pace of daily life. Take a look at the front left of the image, at the conical object in the foreground. Its woven texture, with gaps and inconsistencies, echoes the way the photographer has depicted the rest of the scene; not as a sharp, decisive depiction, but an accumulation of forms, each one slightly blurred or undefined. The work has a timeless quality. Like the paintings of Edward Hopper, it has a quality of existing outside a particular moment, despite its documentary nature. There is a lot of space for the imagination in this image.