Koningin Wilhelmina woont een militaire training bij, waarin militairen een rivier moeten oversteken before 1915

This photograph of Queen Wilhelmina observing a military training exercise, involving soldiers crossing a river, was probably made using a large format camera. You can tell it’s about process; about how the soldiers are figuring out the puzzle of getting across the water, and it’s equally about how the photographer works the image, finding just the right angle to make sense of all these messy details. What grabs me is the tonal range, this kind of narrow, almost monochromatic palette, and how it gives the whole scene a dreamlike quality. Then you see the river. It’s dark, still, and reflecting the bridge, a bridge they had to rig up in a hurry. Look at the makeshift bridge supports that are haphazardly lashed together, and you can see the traces of hands at work. I’m thinking about how someone like Gerhard Richter, might have been intrigued by this image, with its photographic qualities of blur and movement, perhaps using it as source material for one of his own paintings that wrestle with the ambiguity between abstraction and representation.