Compositie van negentien foto's van personen aan de Keizerlijke Militair-Medische Academie, gecombineerd met decoratie van gedroogde takken 1913

This collage of photographs combined with dried branches, by V. Sabel'skij, feels deeply personal. Like someone's handmade scrapbook. The layout isn’t clean or precise, but rather intuitive, and driven by a particular, internal logic. I love how the monochromatic palette of the photographs makes the dried branches really pop. They bring a certain earthiness to what could otherwise be a very formal, stiff collection of portraits. Your eye darts around to make sense of the order, so the physicality of the page is important. It's not just images, but the real feeling of preserved, dried flora. Look at the way the branches spread and intertwine, creating a kind of organic frame, which softens the rigid grid of faces, and suggests the passage of time. I love the way the artist elevates this almost forgotten aesthetic in their work. Like Hannah Höch perhaps, but with foliage instead of newsprint. Art making is like this, an ongoing process of collecting and re-presenting the world around us. It embraces the strange, and elevates the everyday.