Boottocht c. 1935 - 1936

This is a photo album page, titled Boottocht, by an anonymous artist. It shows an array of photos depicting boats on the water, with a limited colour palette, mainly black and white. Looking at this album page I feel a little lost, or unanchored. The album acts as a support, like a canvas, but the images are collaged on top, at various angles. It's hard to know how I'm supposed to read it, or where to look first. There is an image of a boat moored up next to a pier in the centre, which appears to be the main subject of the page. The neutral gray of the water and sky, and the way it is cropped, gives a feeling of a snapshot, not posed or staged, but casually captured. I often think about the relationship between images and memory. An album, like this, has space for lots of versions, which allows for multiplicity and variation. It feels like an open-ended conversation. Like the work of Gerhard Richter, the layering of images and the use of photography captures a sense of memory as always mediated, and never fully complete.