Essay by Sebastian Nuttney for Contextualising Practice
This essay aims to detail my approach and methodology for photographic collages. This framework, presented as a manifesto, was developed alongside a body of photographic Collages completed in the early half of 2024. As I completed more photographic collages, this manifesto began to take shape, each process influencing the other, culminating in the photographic collage Sequence 3, 2024. This six-panel collage will provide the basis for my discussion and will become a starting point for broader discussions about the capacity of photographic collage to reveal deeper insights into our relationship with memory, experience and place and the power within collage to radically shift our existing knowledge of these concepts. The Manifesto begins thus:
- A collage is a conversation, a collection of separate images coming together to create new dialogues. Each constituent image is considered a speaker, and their arrangement begins from this principle. The observer is invited to participate in this conversation, becoming implicit in listening to the collage.
- The process of cutting and removing from the collage is paramount to creating tension. The most important element of the collage is absence. This absence is attained by dissecting images along right angles so that subject matter is not cut around but cut through; fragments along edges remain as an eerie presence and thus create tension.
- The collage is inseparable in practice from the photograph. If photography is a way to view the world, collage is a way this viewing can be expanded upon and interrupted.
- Photography is a record of the past, employed so that collages become collections of prior moments in dialogue with one another. If there is truth to the photograph, the collage will disrupt this truth, both formally and conceptually.
- The subject should be informed by lived experience; a scene must be inhabited, visited, and engaged with to be included. Found imagery should be barred from this series because the series is not about what is found but what has been lived.
I have always had a fascination with the act of daydreaming. Those quiet moments you take to remember, ponder, get lost in your thoughts, and collect yourself upon a threshold. I began taking photographs of places and things that spoke to these quiet memories, trying to trace some common thread that could be seen across all the images. Eventually, the images started coming together, Gradually building on top of one another into a flurried bustle of memories and symbolic images. I had started making collages, before too long I was thinking about what making the collages meant – Could these collages capture and collect all the quiet daydreams I’d spent so long losing myself in? I found myself daydreaming about home, about what it meant to feel at home. The collages began to take shape around this exploration of home – of home disrupted – of home experienced only in memory.
Formally, the collages themselves (Figure 1), six panels roughly forty centimetres wide and sixty centimetres tall, were each comprised of a collection of photographic images (Figures 1). The images are cut and rearranged with an emphasis on the interactions between them. This is a formal process, with lines and shapes leading into each other across disparate images and a conceptual one. How does an out-of-focus view through a window make us feel when it is seen next to an image of an empty hallway? Formally, each element is cut and re-sized according to a right angle so that each element may keep some aspect of its original proportion; this limitation also denies me the opportunity to frame things perfectly when cutting. The focal points of each separate photograph must be bisected. Cutting through, not around, forces me to leave traces at the edges or cut away more than perhaps I would like. The resulting effect is that the Collages become discordant collections, they are not arranged in strictly pleasant and casual ways, but instead like a ‘good bouquet’ there is some clash, and disharmony (Elbow 1997).
The photographs are taken with the knowledge that they will be cut apart, and negative space becomes the prominent element in each image. The empty corridor and doorway become reoccurring images; their inclusion is driven by the experience of looking back down the corridor of a home I no longer occupy. The shadowy interior speaks to a sense of emptiness; as Conkelton Describes, the background of these memories becomes the image’s foreground (Conkelton 1997) and instils the collages with a sense of absence, of loss, of turning away from somewhere or something. Each image becomes framed around this absence so that things cannot be cut apart or shown without something becoming evidently absent. Portions are taken intentionally in soft focus; the blurriness makes it hard to distinguish any one element. Albers describes a similar disorientation in space as ‘waiting in a space of vulnerable limbo’ (2023).
In describing how a collage ‘should’ be constructed, Peter Elbow (1997) states that cutting away is essential to creating absence by physically removing a portion of an image – something that has been lost. David Banash says that this cutting (and the process of collage writ large) reveals the hidden contexts and connections ‘eclipsed by the ideological work of framing’ (Banash 2013:165). The cutting denies this ideology inherent in how the photograph is initially framed (Banash 2013). The images are cut according to a right angle and a straight line, redrawing any ideological boundary imposed by the initial image to create a new ideology. Elements of the subject are then cut through, not traced out, so that portions of things remain along the edges. We see that something has been removed, and the cut is paramount to creating absence and reshaping the subject’s ideology.
I have found the charm of collage to lie in the interactions between independent images. Peter Elbow (1997) states that a collage is a collection of things that ‘sort of go’ together. He points out that intrigue and interest are increased if there is ‘friction, resistance, difference’ (Elbow 1997). The human mind seeks out order, patterns, and logic, which is evident when engaging with a collage (Elbow 1997). Russell A. Rohde (1997) proposes that the success of Collage is in uniqueness, that by combining unexpected elements, the collage can incite further inspection. It is within this uniqueness, the dialogue between unexpected elements, that the observer can insert themselves. They seek to find a pattern between disparate elements and in doing so weave themselves into the fabric of the conversation. By playing on this desire to seek patterns and engaging photographic images loaded with a sense of absence, the collages start to exude a sense of friction and resistance (Elbow 1997).
Photography is integral to my approach to collage; it is employed as what Flynn has called a Memory Technology ( 2001): ‘[a] repository for memory, a place where the past is deposited and later retrieved’ . A collage then takes on a sense of an archive of the past, a place where it begins to overlap and intersect with itself, both constructing an absence by referring to what has been covered or cut away and by constructing a mythology of the artist’s own subjectivity (Flynn 2001). Roland Barthes (1980) describes photographs as ‘not a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution … but reality in a past state: at once the past and the real.’ In being formulated from these fragments of the past, the collage disrupts what was previously experienced. We see separate events alongside one another, reconfigured in a disjointed temporality. Moments that were separated by vast temporal distance are forced to collide to interact, and in doing so, their interpretations change. Brockelmann (2001) writes: ‘there is in Collage a compelling rethinking of philosophical issues of truth and history’. A new subjectivity begins to emerge within the collage.
While, as Kirby has argued, a photograph engages a sense of memory (2021), it should not be viewed as a proxy or a likeness as such. ‘[w]e entrust our fallible memories to cameras, with the belief that the camera does not lie’ (Kirby 2021). John Berger also makes a comparison between photography and memory: ‘[w]hat served in the place of the photograph before the camera’s invention? The expected answer is the engraving, the drawing, the painting. The more revealing answer might be: memory’ (Berger 1980:50). Invoking here a similar sentiment to Susan Sontag (1979), that Photography carries an essence of memory, that the two are inseparable from one another. In opposition to these statements, Alun Kirby (2021) draws from the work of Tim Fawns (2019) to highlight how memory can extend outward from a photograph instead of acting as a proxy for memory itself. Photography fails to perfectly represent our sense of memory, instead acting as a locus for memories (Fawns 2019:3)
Photography is a mnemonic tool, a Memory Technology (Flynn 2001) and should not be regarded as a memory itself but rather a focal point, a place where memory may condense and resolve itself around (Flynn 2001). What we see occurring in the collage is not simply a collection of memories arranged as though a photo album (surely this would be the case if photography was a proxy for memory), but instead, we are presented with a fragmented view. I found this beginning to occur by itself in the collages; the photographic elements did not speak to truth nor to memory; they resided in spaces, as Nayar has noted, beyond but connected to each other (2023). Scenes come into and out of focus within the collage, new storylines emerge; we see past realities emerge anew from having been reconfigured, and each photographic image becomes a focal point that everything else extends outward. (Flynn 2001) In this way, the camera becomes a tool for storytelling, rather than some prophet or truth-teller, the resultant photographs are locus points for memory, for stories (Nayar 2023)
Portions of the collage contain photographs intentionally distorted or out of focus, like those of Uta Barth, that focus on an empty foreground, leaving the background to wither into a soft blur (see Conkelton 1997). These out-of-focus images become remarkably eerie (see Fisher 2016) through ‘absence-as-presence’; we cannot fully grasp the subject matter. Instead, we are left to contend with soft, blurry implications rather than distinct form. In addition to Barth’s photographic work, I was inspired by the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershoi. His interiors speak of somewhere that had been occupied but was, in the painting, now empty. Hammershoi’s paintings exude a sort of ‘mysterious loneliness’ as Pound has described it (2019) or, perhaps more accurately, an eerie absence. It is this emptiness and abstract blur away from the traditional focal points of the figure that partially inspired how the photographs were framed. In this way, these elements speak to the changing nature of recall; we cannot always perfectly remember what we have experienced. Memory is present in the photographs but is ‘out of focus’ (Flynn 2001). The only truth that is then present in the photograph is absence.
In examining how to engage a sense of Absence and utilise it as a formal element to create tension and heighten interest in the colleges, I drew heavily on the work of Mark Fisher (2016). In his 2016 text The Weird and the Eerie, Fisher describes the eerie as a failure of presence and, ultimately, a failure of agency: ‘In the case of the failure of absence, the question concerns the existence of agency as such. Is there a deliberative agent here at all?’ (Fisher 2016). What we see in collage, as fragments within the frame of each constituent photograph are cut through, is the trace of some unknown agency (presumably that of the artist) acting upon the image. These traces are imperfectly cut. By restricting the dissection to a right angle, the artist is forced to leave small traces at the edges that speak to the absence of something greater. The viewer’s mind is left to wonder about this absence and ask what has been removed and why was it removed.
I found it imperative to the collages that they stem from my lived experience. Initially, I’d experimented with found imagery but found the resultant collages bereft of any personal touch. They looked outward at the world, and I wanted to turn inward. I wanted to draw from my own experiences to enrich the images with a sense of something having been experienced, of something having been lived. Gaston Bachelard (1964) provided (among others) a theoretical framework for this making in relation to lived experience. On the home Bachelard writes: ‘[t]he house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer’ (1964:28). Artist and writer Yamini Nayar shares a similar sentiment, explaining the difference between home and house as such that the latter is a structure of brick and mortar, wooden frames and plaster. While the former is a ‘construction of memory, whose raw material is attachment’ (Nayar 2023). I felt in this that I had come upon the focal point of what my collages were trying to say, they spoke to the experience of having lived in the home, having daydreamed within it. The collages became about home, not in a direct, documentarian manner but instead, they spoke to the daydreaming of home they had fostered.
I found it interesting too, that Bachelard found memories to be fickle and curious things, noting that they can only be engaged in an abstract sense without being fixed in space (Bachelard 1964); The memory required space to be fully grasped. At this point, the collages started to speak to a sense of memory, not because they were constructed from photographs (I have noted the separation between photography and memory previously) but because they were rooted in spaces. The empty corridor became that of my childhood home; the doorway leading to darkened interior is at once my home, my previous home, a home yet to be. The spaces in the photographs take on an immemorial, dreamlike quality. They become removed from strict temporality and are left to be experienced as liminal, dreamlike states (Bachelard 1964).
Collage is simple in essence – take two basic things that are different and put them together, but when we dig a little bit deeper into what things, what differences, we see how much more there is to be revealed. ‘Thus we cover’ as Bachelard has noted, ‘the universe with drawings we have lived’ (1964:33). In developing this Manifesto and the related collages (Figures 1) I discovered that there is a great capacity for these collages to speak to experience, to speak to space, to inform, to reveal, to reinterpret. This was evident by how each collage’s emotive and conceptual capacity exceeded its foundational elements’ limitations. The constituent parts of the collage, the photographic image, the cut, and the subject are all foundational blocks that give rise to the interconnected structure of The Collage. The collage, as described here, is not some alienating force denying truth and memory, rather, it becomes a lens through which we might re-imagine a new world.
References:
Albers K P (3rd February 2023) ‘What Uta Barth’s Images Tell Us about the Limits of Sight’, Aperture
Bachelard G (1964) The Poetics of Space New edition, Penguin, London.
Barthes R (1993) Camera Lucida, Translated by Richard Howard, Vintage Classics, London, England
Banash, D (2013), Collage Culture: Readymades, Meaning, and the Age of Consumption, BRILL, Boston
Berger, J (2009), About Looking, Bloomsbury Publishing, London.
Brockelman T P (2001) The Frame and the Mirror: On Collage and the Postmodern, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Illinois
Conkelton S (1997) Uta Barth, Journal of contemporary art, 1997
Elbow P (1997) ‘Collage: Your Cheatin’ Art.’ Writing On the Edge 9.1 (Fall/winter 1997): 26-40.
Fawns T (2020). ‘Blended memory: A framework for understanding distributed autobiographical remembering with photography.’ Memory Studies, 13(6), 901-916. DOI: 10.1177/1750698019829891
Fisher M (2016) The Weird and the Eerie, Repeater Books, London, England
Flynn B (2001) ‘Memory fragments as scene makers’, Screening the past,
Kirby A (2021) ‘No maps for these territories: exploring philosophy of memory through photography’, Estudios de Filosofía, 64, pp. 47–71, doi: 10.17533/udea.ef.n64a03.
Nayar Y (2023) ‘Mapping Obscura: Locating the Space and Non-Space of Memory and Home through the Photograph’ Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 43:6, 450-455, DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2023.2236506
Pound C (18th April 2019) ‘Why Hammershøi is Europe’s great painter of loneliness’, BBC
Rohde R A (1996) ‘Anatomy of photographic Collage’, PSA Journal, 62(10), 11,
Sontag S (1977) On Photography, 1st Picador USA edition, Picador USA, New York
This Essay was crafted without the use of Artificial Intelligence,
‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.’ – F Herbert, 1965