Op wacht en 'Arbeitskommando' 1940

This black and white photograph of military personnel and industrial scenes is pasted onto a page in an album. It’s hard not to think about the artist’s hand as a recording instrument – composing and capturing a scene, developing the print, and pasting it into the album. What were they thinking when they framed these different vignettes? What kind of images were they drawn to? How might the photograph and the act of documenting have allowed the artist to process and make sense of the world around them? Looking at this, I am reminded of the work of Gerhard Richter, particularly his photo paintings based on collected images. Both of these artists were working in the context of a fragmented world and used painting, photography, and collage to create a space for personal and collective remembering.