The Intersection of Photography and Collage Art
Can I repurpose my photographs into a two-dimensional visual idea? I asked myself this question when an exhibition competition, seeking mixed media works, presented an opportunity I couldn’t resist. Adding to the challenge was a broadly defined theme to incorporate trees in the concept.
That’s when the decision to create collages took hold. Collage art would enable me to recontextualize images in my portfolio and give them new meaning. And so began the process of printing, cutting, assembling, gluing, and layering to give new life to my photos and other source material. During obsessive weeks of scissor precision, paper scraps strewn on all nearby surfaces, and sticky fingers, three original collage pieces took shape.
“Life in the Trees”
I have “a thing” for vintage wallpaper and therefore, I shot this illustrative image of birds and other forest creatures from the wall of a historic home. Isolating and repeating the design elements, I aimed for a tile mosaic-like interpretation, outlined by flowers and trees from my collection of landscapes.
“Trees and the Passage of Time”
Although these vintage family photos were not shot by me, I was moved to express the passage of time by visually linking multiple generations with how, as seasons pass, so does the evolution of both people and nature. I added a dried leaf, strangely enough, serendipitously found tucked into the pages of an old book.
“Cherry Blossom Trees in Bloom”
Joyful and colorful was the intension for this piece. I printed one of my photos of cherry blossom trees on transparency film in color as a primary overlay, adding beneath it, cut-out paper illustrations of watercolor-like birds and an added graphic design, both from paper bags.
This was a fun and rewarding project. You don’t have to be a photographer or artist to make a collage with meaning. This New York Times article is a great example of how anyone can easily use newspapers to create something timely, personal, and even cathartic. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/at-home/newspaper-collages.html
Taken from the French word coller, meaning to either stick together or glue, the term “collage” for collage art was born. Coined by Cubist artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, they were the first pioneers of this movement.
Just recently, I learned that David Hockney, one of my favorite contemporary painters, created collage art using his photographs. In the early 1980s, Hockney began to produce photo collages—which in his early explorations within his personal photo albums he referred to as “joiners” (see images below). His collages consisted of grid-like compositions made up of polaroid photographs. He then switched to photo lab processed 35mm photographs and created collages that took on a shape of their own, creating abstract representations of the scenes he had photographed.
We can all be creators, in whatever form that takes.
Sharon
