S.O. Goenoengsari. Ketelstation. Juli 1927. 1927

This gelatin silver print of S.O. Goenoengsari Ketelstation was made in July 1927 by an anonymous artist. It's all about surfaces, a gritty inventory of the station’s interior. Check out how the light plays along the wall, hitting the grimy metal doors, with their handles and hinges, and picking up the textures of the ceiling. The monochrome palette gives everything a uniform feel, making the photo about form and depth rather than color. Your eye is pulled back into the distance by the receding perspective. You can almost feel the temperature in that room. Think of Bernd and Hilla Becher, with their deadpan photographs of industrial structures. This picture shares that same impulse to document these kinds of spaces that might otherwise go unnoticed. Of course, the history of photography is just a big conversation between artists responding to each other’s work, and asking, what can we see?