Bezoek van Koning Leopold, aan de Kon Familie te Soestdijk Possibly 1938

This arrangement of photographs titled "Bezoek van Koning Leopold, aan de Kon Familie te Soestdijk" was assembled by an anonymous artist. I’m thinking about the maker here, snipping away at the edges of these prints, arranging them on the page. Each one is a little monument in itself. Look at the way they’re organized – the family gathering on the stoop in the largest image, and then the cropped, intimate portraits of the baby next to it. Was this an intuitive process, deciding where to put each piece? Or was it carefully considered, playing with positive and negative space, like Diebenkorn composing his Ocean Park series? The artist frames each image, giving importance to the everyday, but also creating something totally new. It's a way of saying, 'I'm here, I see this, and I want you to see it too.' In the end, the artist’s simple act of collecting and composing transforms a set of images into something tender and sublime.