Thursday Post 4-9-09

Collage

"Collage has seemed to be lacking in sincerity, to represent a corruption of moral principles, an adulteration. One thinks of Picasso's Still life with chair caning of 1911-12, his first collage, and one begins to understand why."
- Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter

Adamowicz, Elza. Surrealist Collage in Text and Image.


"With the invention of photography traditional modes of pictorial expression have been rendered redundant, just as automatic writing, defined as 'la photographie de l'esprit', has disrupted the field. The pictorial possibilities opened up by photography and film anchor the collage aesthetic in radical forms of representation based on the transformation of pre-existing elements.

I found this quote particularly inspiring. Due to photography's ability to render near exact images of our surroundings, other mediums burst out in all directions in order to find new forms of representation. The collage, which may take both photographic and non-photographic materials, is completely based on the ability for images to transform due to their creative juxtaposition to other elements. This relates to my work, as I am collaging drawings with my photos to transform the content of my abstract photos into scenes entirely different than the objects that make up the photos. Wow...that was a bit of a run-on. This transformation is key to my concept of visual trickery. Without collage my images may be visually analogous with what I wish them to appear to be, but the viewer may see something else (which is not necessarily bad, but not what I want) or even worse they might assume they are looking at nothing but colors or patterns - and have make no mental connection to anything in the real world. If this were to happen, my visual trickery concept would completely fall apart - so it is in collage and it's ability to transform that my concept can be realized.