It was a pleasure to be back at Unseen, this time as part of the wider Art Rotterdam 2026 at Rotterdam Ahoy. With a bit of orientation, we quickly found our way to the Unseen gallery section, helped by the impeccable signage and mapping throughout the vast exhibition hall. The result exceeded expectations: a rich and varied selection of photographic work from a wide range of international galleries. As always, one cannot like everything, but there was more than enough to admire, question, or simply pass by. I was particularly struck by the work of Jacob Gils with his blurred trees printed on Japanese paper and presented in elegant floating frames. The photographs of Ray K. Metzker, taken in the 1980s, also left a lasting impression. His “chiaroscuro” cityscapes, “City Whispers”, captured in Philadelphia, give a warm peaceful feeling. Arsen Revazov revisits historical battlefields through infrared photography. I found myself dreaming in Borodino, with thoughts of my ancestor who fought there, and in Dien Bien Phu, a place one might rather forget. In a more nostalgic vein, Thomas Jorion explores sites he calls Vestiges d’Empire, offering a sober reflection on France’s colonial past. Meanwhile, the earlier works of Colin Jones evoke the industrial history of Great Britain through his powerful images of the Liverpool docks. And last but not least, Florence Verrier of Galerie Parallax presented the special work of Denis Felix and his series Les Sages, a poetic photographic series on glass that transforms trees into fossil-like images, evoking forests as timeless keepers of memory and creating a fragile link between past, present, and future through material, light, and silence. Quite stunning.
