The Cast

The Cast (2017) collects Ruth van Beek's (b. 1977) sculptural collages built from an archive of found photographs, botanical and craft images clipped from vintage books and magazines, physically reworked into biomorphic, almost animate forms.

Van Beek cuts, folds, and layers her source images, adding painted paper and cast shadow to turn flat found pictures into what read as small sculptures, actors staged rather than depicted, borrowing photography's own conventions of shadow, pedestal, and gesture to lend invented objects an unearned authority. New Documents, the Los Angeles art-book publisher, released this 40-page softcover-with-jacket first edition in 2017.

Van Beek studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where she has taught since 2014, and works from her home in Koog aan de Zaan, near Amsterdam. Her books include The Arrangement (2013) and The Oldest Thing (2023), both shortlisted for the Aperture Photobook of the Year Award her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vogue, and Foam Magazine, and she is represented by The Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam.