Walking up the steps from a bustling city into the reverberant halls of an art museum can feel like a sacred experience. That’s the case for photographer Andrés Wertheim. “Once inside, the sounds of the street disappear, [and] the place becomes a cocoon where one can connect to the cultural legacy of past times,” he says. “I feel like [I’m] accessing a higher experience as a human being.”

It was on just such a trip to Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum that he noticed something that sparked his curiosity. “A crowd was standing in front of Rembrandt's 'Night Watch.' Nobody was looking at a great, huge painting hanging in the same room, and I wondered why we are so conditioned through media and