De buurt waar de familie Wachenheimer woonde, 1939, Rotterdam 1939

Curator: What strikes me most about this album page, titled "De buurt waar de familie Wachenheimer woonde, 1939, Rotterdam," is how it's a memory scrapbook materialized. Editor: There's an understated fragility here. The fading albumen prints and the aging paper hint at stories untold, secrets almost lost to time. It's quietly haunting. Curator: Exactly. The images are simple street scenes from Rotterdam, documented the same year World War II started. We see handwritten notes – “Rotterdam 1939” above, and then what looks to be “de wordende Dierentuin” – near the images, too. The “developing zoo”. Editor: A “developing zoo”, how innocent, yet it’s paired with images of such stark urban landscapes, full of empty spaces and potential. There's a compelling paradox. It's almost as if those small gardens and landscapes symbolize the dreams that are about to disappear. The promise of the future disrupted. Curator: Precisely! In terms of iconography, the sparseness of the landscape seems almost prophetic. And, paired with the typewritten titles... the stylized text creates a sense of formality juxtaposed with that homespun quality. It's a potent mix. Editor: I agree. This collision embodies the uncertainty, both on a personal and broader historical scale. The way the family compiled these photographs… there's an act of resistance to obliteration. A trace for posterity. Curator: Absolutely. The repetitive framing of the images in such close quarters intensifies the effect. Each little square is both a window into a place and a piece of a larger, broken whole. A community, perhaps? Editor: Yes! Even the act of arranging these on the page tells a story: arranging memories in order to make a sense of what to remember. Curator: Looking at this work helps us remember too; a layered story about memory, about the war's eve, about personal resilience… I feel like I’m catching the quiet echo of voices. Editor: For me, there is beauty in those fragmented moments—to extract the stories held between those edges of then, in the here and now.