This is the house Anne Frank hid in for two years during World War II. The "Anne Frankhuis" is much bigger than I expected and it was very surreal to walk through the secret passage behind the revolving bookcase as she described in her diary. Anne was only 13 years old when she started writing her diary in 1942.
Today, it's quite an impressive "museum", but the rooms are all empty leaving only old photographs, her many diaries, and your imagination for how life must have been there. When you look out the window, you see a beautiful modern day friendly Amsterdam bustling with people and tourists, it was extremely hard for me to imagine just how opposite that window scene was during the war.
One of my favourite things is the challenge of photographing iconic buildings and places in my own new way. As I looked at the Anne Frank House from the street, I was a bit stymied. I took several with different angles with the sky and trees but I didn't feel they were original and lacked an obvious subject, especially if you didn't know the significance of the building. Then I remembered I was there to photograph bikes, and suddenly I had a photograph with an obvious subject visually, yet it is its background that is the true subject.
Compositionally, I like how the springs of the seat bounce your eye up to the building.
Today, it's quite an impressive "museum", but the rooms are all empty leaving only old photographs, her many diaries, and your imagination for how life must have been there. When you look out the window, you see a beautiful modern day friendly Amsterdam bustling with people and tourists, it was extremely hard for me to imagine just how opposite that window scene was during the war.
One of my favourite things is the challenge of photographing iconic buildings and places in my own new way. As I looked at the Anne Frank House from the street, I was a bit stymied. I took several with different angles with the sky and trees but I didn't feel they were original and lacked an obvious subject, especially if you didn't know the significance of the building. Then I remembered I was there to photograph bikes, and suddenly I had a photograph with an obvious subject visually, yet it is its background that is the true subject.
Compositionally, I like how the springs of the seat bounce your eye up to the building.