Militairen tijdens een oefening before 1915

This anonymous photograph, titled 'Militairen tijdens een oefening', captures an exercise, or perhaps something more real. The muted sepia tones give it a sense of something found, something from the past. I love how the image plays with depth. Look at the foreground, how the grassy texture almost vibrates, then your eye is pulled back into the shadows where the soldiers huddle beneath the trees, becoming part of the landscape. The artist's process is to create a scene that obscures as much as it reveals. The photograph reminds me of Gerhard Richter's blurry paintings, where details dissolve into a kind of abstracted memory. In both, there's this idea of a world seen through a haze, a world that's hard to grasp, where meaning is elusive. It's a beautiful and haunting effect.