Groepsfoto's Possibly 1940 - 1949

These photographs of groups have been collected in an album. The images are fixed, but the meanings keep shifting, accumulating, changing with time. I imagine the person who took these photos, maybe they were a friend. They’re lining up their subjects and asking them to smile, but perhaps they're also aware of the complexities of what's going on around them. It's 1940. They are taking pictures of soldiers. What are they thinking, feeling? These images make me think about the work of Gerhard Richter who also used photographs in his paintings, blurring the images to create a sense of distance, to challenge the notion of photography as objective truth. How can we ever really know what’s going on in a picture? I guess that's for us to decide. It’s so subjective. Every time we look, we see something different.