Feest 1939

This photo album page, “Feest,” was made by an anonymous artist, sometime in the past. It is a collection of black and white photographs pasted onto a grey page. I'm trying to imagine the act of choosing and sticking the photographs onto this page. I wonder, was it a celebration of sorts, or a memorial? There's a church in the upper middle, and groups of uniformed men. Maybe they were remembering, maybe they were processing something. The photographs are placed with deliberation. The artist probably pondered where to place the images. The album is heavy with the weight of memory, like a painter layering paint, each addition leaving its mark. I think about how art becomes a kind of archive, like an ongoing conversation across time. What would it have been like to be there at the time? I feel it gets to something about how we're all just trying to make sense of things, each of us contributing our experiences.