Ingebruikneming van een winkelpand 1914 - 1919

This small photograph of a shop being opened, or ‘Ingebruikneming van een winkelpand’ as it’s called in Dutch, brings to mind how photography is so good at freezing a moment in time. I can almost feel the dust and grit of that place under my fingernails, and imagine how the light must have felt beating down on that tin roof. I wonder who those people are, gathering outside; what does the shop sell? What were their hopes for this new business? The anonymous photographer must have felt a thrill to capture this place. The jumble of planks and bricks in the foreground give the image a lovely unfinished quality – as if it only just came into being. You know, photographs are a bit like paintings in that way. They share a similar impulse; to render the world visible, to notice, to pay attention. It's all about looking, and trying to understand what it is to be alive.