Tombeau Imaginaire 25 2019

Elina Brotherus made this photograph, *Tombeau Imaginaire 25*, with a camera. The cool, almost monochromatic palette makes me think about the moodiness of Northern light in winter. The figure, cloaked and still, feels like they are slowly dissolving into the landscape. Brotherus’s handling of light and shadow gives the image a hazy, dreamlike quality. The soft gradation of tones from dark to light echoes the way our vision sometimes softens at the edges, allowing for multiple interpretations. It’s hard to know if the subject is walking into the forest, or away from it. This ambiguity reminds me of Caspar David Friedrich and other Romantic painters who sought to capture the sublime power of nature and humanity’s small place within it. But unlike them, Brotherus subtly reverses that trope, and focuses on the possibilities of our relationship to the natural world. Is it menacing or consoling? The picture isn’t telling.