Benjamin Goluboff
Untitled Photograph by Emmy Andriesse
Amsterdam, 1945
The shot is through a window from a darkened room.
Andriesse must have sat a few feet back from the sill,
her camera screened behind objects on the table:
a bowl that once held fruit, perhaps,
the tea set in the composition’s foreground.
A lamp burns on the table at the picture’s focal point,
and throws a spot of brightness on the window
where, outdoors and a little out of focus,
a German soldier walks his bike.
Andriesse never titled the picture, but it reads anyhow;
Still Life with Wehrmacht Officer.
About the writer:
Benjamin Goluboff teaches English at Lake Forest College. In addition to some scholarly publications, he has placed imaginative work — poetry, fiction, and essays — in many small- press journals, recently Unbroken, Bird’s Thumb, and War Literature and the Arts. He is the author of Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse, and Other Poems (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2017).
Image: Untitled Photograph by Emmy Andriesse, Gelatin Silver Print. Amsterdam, 1945. Copyright status.
