Untitled (exterior of house) c. 1950

This black and white photograph of a house, made by Robert Burian and held in the Harvard Art Museums, feels like a memory. What’s so striking is the flatness, a kind of stark tonality that almost erases depth. It’s as if Burian is asking us to look beyond the surface, to see the house not just as a structure, but as an idea. I imagine him thinking about Walker Evans or Bernd and Hilla Becher, mining the poetry of the everyday, but then I wonder if it was just a way of seeing, or an attitude. That negative contrast is unnerving. It makes you look, really look, and wonder, how can something so familiar, a house, become so strange? This piece makes me think about how photographs can be both hyper-real and totally abstract. It’s in those contradictions that art happens, isn’t it?