Else Wachenheimer-Moos en haar echtgenoot Eugen Wachenheimer met Lise Schülein op vakantie, augustus 1932, Eibsee (Beieren) 1932 - 1938

This photograph, taken in August 1932 at Eibsee in Bavaria, captures Else Wachenheimer-Moos, her husband Eugen, and Lise Schülein on holiday, and was made by a member of the Wachenheimer family. Look at the way the light falls, creating soft gradients across the subjects' clothing and the landscape behind them. It’s the kind of nuanced monochrome that gives the image a timeless quality, where every shade feels carefully considered. The graininess of the print, a kind of all-over texture, reminds me that the photo is an object, evidence of a specific moment captured in time. Consider the pose of the figures in the photograph on the left, where two of the women stand on what looks like a terrace, one hand resting on a railing. This gesture of casual elegance, repeated in both images, feels so studied, so deliberate. You get a sense of how photography changed the way people wanted to see themselves. It makes me think of other artists who use the photographic image, like Gerhard Richter. The same interest in the ways photography reveals, and maybe conceals, something about our experience.