Vier foto's van vrienden van Loentje Onnen op de tennisbaan en zwemmend 1911 - 1916

Here, in this unassuming photo album page, Carolina Onnen has arranged four photos of friends at leisure, probably made with a simple camera around 1911. What strikes me is how the sepia tones flatten the depth of field. It's like looking at faded memories. The images feel less like precise documents and more like impressionistic sketches, a process of remembering through the lens. Look at the lower left photo, of the swimmers. The surface of the water is a field of silver gelatin, broken up by the dark punctuation marks of the swimmer's heads. There's a beautiful tension between the blurry forms and the clarity of the subjects within. This kind of photographic ambiguity relates to the work of someone like Gerhard Richter, even though Richter is working within abstraction. Onnen's photo album shows that art is often about capturing fleeting moments and finding meaning in the mundane, an ongoing conversation across time.