De St. Laurenskerk 1940

This is a page from a photo album, created by Alie Rondberg-Vrauwdêunt, containing three black and white photographs of the St. Laurenskerk church. I see this process of assembling the images as a way of making sense of the world. The images are affixed to a pale yellow page, with the church’s name written in looping cursive above. The photographs are each shot from slightly different angles, and in different states of ruin. The bottom image, especially, shows the church in disrepair, a pile of rubble laying in the foreground. The sky behind the church is a heavy grey, suggesting a recent devastation. I find myself looking at the way the artist chose to arrange these photographs on the page. It reminds me a bit of Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas,” which also uses photographic arrangements to evoke a sense of memory and history. Both artists embrace ambiguity, understanding that fixed meanings are less interesting than a multitude of interpretations.