Dorpelingen op een kano op een rivier in Suriname 1925 - 1927

This photograph shows villagers on a canoe on a river in Suriname, but who took it and when remains unknown. The image plays with light and dark, the way the water reflects the trees overhead reminds me of some of Gerhard Richter’s abstract paintings. In his work too, the surface has a strange reflective quality that is both representational and unreal. The water is still, but we can see the movement of the boat, with ripples spreading out from the centre. If you look closely at the top left of the image, the dark mass of the trees almost completely obscures the figures. It's funny how photographic images often make us focus on the foreground of the image, so that we can easily miss these details. The picture reminds us that seeing is always a process of selection. Much like painting, photography creates its own kind of abstraction.