Gezicht op een steeg met hangend wasgoed c. 1865 - 1900

Editor: This gelatin-silver print, “Gezicht op een steeg met hangend wasgoed,” or "View of an Alley with Hanging Laundry," by Laurens Lodewijk Kleijn, probably taken sometime between 1865 and 1900… it's almost ghostly. The tones are so muted and gray. What catches your eye in this piece? Curator: It’s interesting you say ghostly; there's something ethereal about it, isn't there? It's more than just a photograph, it feels like a memory fading into time. Notice how the light sort of…caresses the laundry? It's almost as if the mundane is being elevated to the poetic. And I find myself wondering, what stories are woven into those cloths, drying in the sun, or perhaps waiting for the sun. Don’t you wonder who they belong to, what they might represent about those unseen inhabitants? Editor: I hadn’t thought of the laundry having its own stories. It does give the photo an intimate feel, even though there are no people visible. Do you think the absence of people was intentional? Curator: Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps he sought this view when the alley was temporarily empty. Or, maybe, he saw that even the space *left behind* by people is full of presence and intrigue, that those absences can sometimes scream louder than any portrait. Don’t you think that leaving space for imagination is often the best art? Editor: That’s such a lovely way of looking at it. I came in seeing a simple photograph, but I’m leaving with a whole narrative playing out in my head. Curator: Isn't it wonderful when art does that? It holds up a mirror, not just to the world, but to ourselves and the stories we are always writing within ourselves. It is, after all, just light, paper, and some chemicals, but we turn it into our own dreams, don't we?