INTRODUCTION
For this project we were asked to choose an artist/designer (preferably that we’ve seen) and collage with them every day for six days. The conversation we were to have through this collaging could be serious, fun, or anything we wanted. I choose Sally Mann as my artist, and I wanted to have a serious conversation about her influences in my work. With this choice I landed on analog collage because it would be the most genuine way to combine our works.
PROCESS
I started off by selecting images by Mann and I that I thought were interesting or similar. I created two documents and printed them out. After that I set up my “shop” for the week.
I kept this mess on my table for the 6 days, and every day I would come in and create one collage. After the first collage, I came up with a methodology of how I would find inspiration. I would look through the images and select one where I thought a subject could be extracted, and then I would look for another image by the other artist where a similar subject (similar literally or similar in style) was photographed. I would then extract this other subject. I would repeat this process until I had multiple images to play with/until I was satisfied. Then, I combined these images together to form a collage. When combining the images I would take a more liberal approach, where I would experiment with layering and positioning of images until I was satisfied with the placement and the feeling it emitted.
After finishing all my collages I arranged them in a way that felt balanced and would draw the eyes in to the pieces rather than out. Bellow are the final pieces in order of creation (and a little about their creation):
Day one I was looking for a way to incorporate seemingly random pieces of our work together. I had an image of a koi fish in the water that seemed to swim in darkness, and I wanted to use that since it was such a strange image of a beautiful creature. With that idea of strange beauty in mind I looked for a subject by Mann that also possessed this strange beauty and could be incorporated with the koi. I found a photo of one of her kids leaning on a tree and thought it looked like a worm on a line. This felt appropriate.
On the second day I wanted to explore the somber feeling I get when I look at a Sally Mann picture. I had an image of a backlit leg next to a window and an image of Emmett’s shadow in the water (he looked like he was being swallowed). I combined these two images but wasn’t satisfied, so I found another image of Emmett in the water and placed it above the two previous images to make it look like he was “controlling” what was happening. Since I repeated the subject of Sally’s picture I thought it would be appropriate to the the same with mine, finding another image of my friend Ellie that could be used in this collage. I found a portrait that fit almost perfectly, so I decided to cut her face and move it to the other side of the image.
When sorting through the images on the third day I kept encountering images of limbs over and over again. I thought it was funny how limbs often are a large part of both our works and decided to dedicate a whole collage to this parallel. Since limbs inherently have “beginnings” and “end” I wanted to use this inherent nature as part of my collage by having these body parts pointing to something and leading the eye to the center of the page.
On this day I found similarities between the positioning of two portraits. Although the positioning was similar, the lighting was opposite with the image of Ellie being bright and the image of Mann’s husband more somber. I wanted to play with the contrasting ways we approached these portraits by trying to find ways in which to position these two together but I wasn’t satisfied by how they stacked on top of each other or how they looked facing each other. I looked for a way to combine these two and found a photo of a beach I took, and used that as the binder of these images. It somewhat resembles earth moving through day and night, or heaven and hell.
On the fifth day I had this beautiful image of a girl in the water, and again although limbs weren’t the main subject, they were a large part of what the eye gravitated to. The fingers were the thing I was most attracted to. I looked for an image of a hand in my work where finger were also the focus. I put both hands together.
For my last piece I had only remains of photos. Lots of the obvious similarities were already found and I had to dig deep to find ways in which our images fit together. I cut out lots of bit of pictures that I found interesting and tried to put them together. In the end, I used pictures of the same people again, with a repetition of Emmett and Ellie in different occasions. This felt appropriate for both our works and I created a more artistic image rather than a conceptual one. I still think it has merit as many of Mann’s pictures of her family are about the situation or the person rather than a greater meaning.
