Surinamerivier 1925 - 1935

These two photographs of the Surinamerivier were made at an unknown date by an anonymous artist. What strikes me here is the layering of depth. There is the picture plane, the paper that is itself placed on a grey page in an album. These rectangles frame a depiction of water, but the flat surface of the photo, the grayscale palette and crisp tonal range, remind me of the way Gerhard Richter uses photography as source material, blurring it in paint to call attention to the space between reality and representation. The dark areas read as solid, and flatten the image, but look closely and you'll see the trees are full of movement. The anonymous artist here captures the river as something both monumental and fleeting, a conversation between earth and water that asks us to consider what it means to observe and be changed by the world around us.