Landschap met in de verte rookpluimen 1940 - 1945

Editor: This gelatin-silver print, created anonymously between 1940 and 1945, is titled "Landscape with Plumes of Smoke in the Distance". It has this sepia-toned stillness, almost like a faded memory, but then the smoke on the horizon hints at something really unsettling. What feelings or meanings do you think the image is trying to evoke? Curator: You know, that unsettling feeling is precisely where I start too. It’s a landscape, but not of peace, is it? Those plumes aren't just benign clouds; they carry the weight of unseen conflict, of war perhaps too close for comfort. Think of what wasn’t being photographed—the absent people, the stories smoldering just beyond the frame. There is something almost Romantic in the painterly treatment, as though the artist wants to ennoble it, but ennoble what? Editor: The lack of a clear subject, maybe? I’m used to war photos being right there, explicit. This is so… muted. Curator: Exactly. It invites contemplation on the edges of violence. Where is the focal point of this photo, can you tell? Do you see the landscape, its soft contours—doesn’t that play against the harshness of the plumes, this idyllic vista troubled by distant turmoil? Editor: I think it might be how the softness throws the smoke plumes into high relief. Curator: Maybe that juxtaposition *is* the story. What the anonymous artist wanted to share or, maybe more accurately, to ask of us. Perhaps to consider how close tranquility and terror, nature and destruction, are destined to coexist. Editor: So, it's less about showing war, and more about making you feel its shadow, this sense of something looming just outside the frame. Curator: Precisely. It is the anxiety and premonition that settles on you, as if an uncertain future might rewrite the present without any warning. Editor: Well, now I definitely won’t be able to look at landscapes the same way. Thanks!