Eggs and Box #1 1938

Nathan Lerner made this gelatin silver print, called Eggs and Box #1, sometime in the twentieth century. It's a still life, right? But the contrast is so stark, the spheres so flat, it's halfway to abstraction. I’m thinking about Lerner setting up this shot, maybe multiple times, each slightly different. Look at the way the light falls, creating these deep shadows, those dark holes punched into the heavy black surface. And then these threads, crisscrossing, holding up those floating circles like he's mapping out a constellation, like a diagram. It's as if Lerner’s inviting us to question what we think we know. To see the world not as a collection of objects, but as a field of relations, full of potential. It makes me think about Moholy-Nagy, and others at the Bauhaus, who were pushing photography beyond mere representation. Anyway, it makes you think, what else is hiding in plain sight?