Echtpaar Berti Hoppe en Herman Besselaar in en rond hun huis te Rotterdam 1936

This series of photographs, by Berti Hoppe, probably taken around 1936, feels like a series of vignettes. I am immediately drawn to the texture, not just in the images themselves, but of the placement on the page. It feels like a found object, or collection of objects. Thinking about the process of image making, I find the arrangement of the photographs fascinating – the careful spacing and layout reminds me of collage. The scalloped edges of the photos adds a tactile, almost playful quality. There’s something intimate about the images of a couple at home in Rotterdam, captured in different poses and settings. I keep coming back to the image of the dog, centered, as if it is a formal portrait, this small mark of the artist's life as a metaphor for the broader story of a life lived and shared, of domesticity. This reminds me of the photo albums of Gerhard Richter, where the personal and the mundane become material for art. And, like Richter, Hoppe embraces ambiguity, allowing the viewer to piece together fragments of a narrative without offering a fixed interpretation.