Treating the camera as an artistic instrument rather than a documentary tool, Rudolf Dührkoop created portraits that evoke a subject’s inner life with unusual nuance. In Neuenfelde-Kirchdorf (a district in Hamburg whose name means “new field” and “church village”), his lens turns toward an elderly woman seated at a mirror, as if facing the monument of her own history. The life she has lived gathers in the folds of her expression and the delicate tresses of wrinkled skin. Send this to an elder who has filtered your world in sepia tone, keeping you grounded and reminding you of the improbable fact of existence itself.

Courtesy of the Museum of Arts and Crafts Hamburg