Tombeau Imaginaire 19 2019

Elina Brotherus made this photograph, “Tombeau Imaginaire 19,” maybe with a digital camera, but who knows? It's a scene playing with scale, and with our expectations of landscape. I love the way Brotherus has framed the photograph. There are these huge, rounded boulders that dominate the foreground. They feel almost cartoonish in their smoothness. Then, in the middle of the river, there’s this figure, a woman, standing on a rock. She’s so small, almost an afterthought, but she creates this tension. It's all about surface and texture, the rough grain of the rocks against the smooth, flowing water. The color palette is so restrained. I think of Caspar David Friedrich and his solitary figures dwarfed by nature, but Brotherus gives it this contemporary, slightly surreal twist. It's like she’s saying, "Here we are, tiny humans in this vast world, trying to find our place." It's beautiful, and it's a little bit funny, too.