Groepsportret met twee vrouwen en een man 1882 - 1920

Hendrik van Noort made this photograph of two women and a man in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. It's mounted on card, like a page from a family album. What strikes me about it is the tonal range: the background is a soft, blurry, mid-tone grey, and the three figures emerge out of this gloom, their faces and costumes rendered in subtle gradations of light and shadow. Van Noort has thought carefully about how the surface texture of the clothes reflects light, and how the arrangement of the figures in the frame animates the composition, giving the image structure. There is something touchingly ordinary about this image, the way the sitters haven’t been idealized, but presented in all their awkwardness. You can see this particularly in the way the man's legs are positioned – one foot angled outwards, giving him a nonchalant air. Walker Evans would also elevate such humble subjects, in his Depression-era photographs. Art is a conversation across time, isn't it? A process of continual looking and re-looking.