Aan het strand c. 1935 - 1936

This album page called ‘Aan het strand’ presents a set of black and white photographs, glued onto a page, a memento of days out, of being ‘at the beach’. The beach! It’s always been a kind of liminal space for artists, a place to hang out and think, and here, we have an anonymous set of images documenting friends and family at leisure. It’s interesting to see how the photographic image, the surface of the photo, almost becomes like a brushstroke. Look at the arrangement of the photographs in the album, how they sit on the page, like a constellation of images. See the way the corners are pasted onto the album page, creating a secondary geometry around the photographic image. It’s like the mounting becomes another frame within a frame, a kind of figure-ground relationship. Think of Gerhard Richter’s ‘Atlas’ project, an ongoing arrangement of found photographs, organized on boards, where the photographic image becomes a point of departure for a much wider meditation on image making. Art is always a conversation, an exchange of ideas.