Now, Vermeer is generally thought of as a painter of quiet interiors, usually with a solitary figure, usually female, with just a few odd paintings lying outside these descriptors. When I visited the Dutch museums for the first time, around , this strange painting surprised me as much as The anatomy lesson and the other remarkable Rembrandts in the Hague museum. Not knowing to whom to attribute it, I consulted the catalogue: View of the Town of Delft, beside a canal, by Jan van der Meer of Delft.
Here is someone of whom we know nothing in France, and who deserves to be known! The astounding painter! But, after Rembrandt and Frans Hals, is this van der Meer, then, one of the foremost masters of the entire Dutch School? How was it that one knew nothing of an artist who equals, if he does not surpass, Pieter de Hooch and Metsu?
In my previous post, Cameras Obscura , I wrote about my own encounters with the work of Vermeer, and of seeing the Little Street while studying A-level art, and of Arthur J. Wheelock Jr. As a result I had my own imaginary conception of the city long before I travelled there, and one built in a formative stage in my own life. I have excerpted a short sequence as an animated GIF below; the thinness of the negative shows any dust incredibly well, a result of a lack of cleaning before scanning and ad hoc processing conditions - essentially attempting to improvise a means of drying 25ft of 2x8mm film in a hurry.
One reason for shooting film, rather than digital, were the sense of having a physical artefact, an indexical link to the contingencies of the location itself, ideas which probably do not hold too much weight in the digital present, especially with the results digitised and disseminated through a digital medium; regardless, what is recorded onto the physical medium is something other than a provisional interpolation of data and, if ever exhibited, a positive could be printed from the negative and projected.
In Ways of Hearing , Damon Krukowski attempts to encapsulate how it felt as a musician to be recording to tape in the s, not an entirely unsympathetic analogy:. Analog recording is like an accident in other ways. You could try again, if you had the time and money. Facing the view, a raised platform above the quayside of the Kolk provides an approximate elevation to the correct viewpoint: Vermeer may have used the second floor of an inn which stood on that spot in the seventeenth century to make his painting.
