Rein Jelle Terpstra

Can photography conceal the real world? Rein Jelle Terpstra asked himself this question when he stumbled upon an old collection of negatives featuring landscapes, tulips, country lanes and Dutch skies. At first glance, they are photogenic compositions like the ones we see in paintings, but the date and place which the anonymous amateur photographer carefully noted in the margins of each negative tell a different story, for the world outside the frame was in the grip of the Second World War.

In Dark Dunes Terpstra will be showing more than twenty photographs from this collection in large-format negatives. Outsized reproductions of pages from newspapers published at the same time hanging in the space feature articles about everyday life and the progress of the war. Once again, it will be clear that photography is by no means always an infallible witness to what is really happening in the world.