Houseplants Covered With Snow

Houseplants Covered With Snow is a small collage artist book by the Dutch artist Ruth Van Beek, built entirely from cut, folded, and reassembled photographs sourced from vintage horticultural books and magazines.

Van Beek works from a growing personal archive of found photographic material, mostly plant and specimen photography from the 1950s through the 1970s, which she cuts out, pastes, and folds into odd, quietly surreal compositions. The 45-page softcover book, 171 x 241 mm, was published by Dashwood Books in New York in 2014 and was issued alongside a companion volume, Houseplants, from the same body of work.

Van Beek's practice sits at the intersection of photography, collage, and sculpture; she treats the found photograph as raw material rather than document, and her books, including The Levitator and The Cast, have become a recognizable strand of contemporary Dutch photobook-making built on appropriation and reconstruction rather than original image-making.