Villa en groepsfoto 1940 - 1945

This photograph, Villa en groepsfoto, shows two images placed on a page in a photo album. The album page is a pale grey and the black and white photos are held in place with decorative corner tabs. It makes me think of collage, how the combination of different materials and images can suggest new ways of seeing, of making connections. The photo at the top left is of a large, slightly forbidding house surrounded by trees. The photo at the bottom right shows a group of young men posing in front of a building, most likely soldiers. The surfaces are smooth, the details rendered in shades of grey. Look closely and you can see the contrast between the sharp architectural lines of the buildings and the softer edges of the natural world. Like, how do these images talk to each other? What story might they tell? It’s not fixed, you know? It reminds me of Gerhard Richter’s photographic paintings, how he used found images as a starting point, blurring the boundaries between abstraction and representation. Art is, after all, an ongoing dialogue, a conversation that evolves with each new contribution.