During the pandemic I started collaging. It was the result of a restless mind, a mind that ended the day exhausted and wired. A mind that needed a space of non-verbal experimentation.
For the last 10 years I’ve been making documentary films. I’ve been capturing things I see and experience, encounters created by my presence with my camera, and then editing them. Editing is, in some ways, a deeply rational experience. It is, or can be, a making sense of disparate elements. Elements which often have no inherent relationship to each other except through the filmmakers encounter, association, curiosity, focus. It can be a way of creating meaning, of creating order, of creating relationships, or as my father used to say, of making shapes.
But editing is also deeply improvisational. It can just as easily be a space where one practices not being in control. A place where words are inadequate, where nothing is knowable, and everything is relational.
Collaging, in its simplest form, is taking found materials, usually images, and cutting them up and rearranging them. It feels similar to documentary editing, and contains a similar joy. One of recognition, of surprise, of creating new ambiguous meanings from disparate things.
It feels strange to put my experience of collage into words, because I gravitate to it specifically because I don’t have to rationalize it, and it doesn’t have to be for anything. I don’t share them, I don’t even glue them. I don’t have a thesis about what I’m drawn to, or why I make them. I do it because I get a very slow and real joy from rearranging elements of the so-called world and discovering what gets created when you put them out of context and into different configurations.
Most recently I’ve been cutting out landscapes and separating the various elements. The cliffs from the sea. The ravine from the river. The foreground from the background. I don’t know why I do this. Some of it surely must have to do with the material I’m working with.
I’ve been using old National Geographics. I got about 150 from a woman named Lee on Craigslist. Here’s what she wrote in an email to me: “My only request is that you re-gift them upon completion of your research to someone who will read and enjoy them.” I wrote back coordinating a time to pick them up, knowing full well that I would not honor her request. And I wondered why she cared.
I grew up on National Geographics, and I wanted to be a photographer for them. The promise of a life of adventure, of spending weeks in the tundra photographing penguins, of traveling to Vietnam and walking amongst the markets.
I flip through the National Geographics and that dream looks more and more nefarious. I notice the articles about Europe with images of nightclubs with captions such as “a beautiful blonde dances after hours”, and images of people fishing and greeting each other in the stores, or playing soccer. And then there are the articles on Africa, with photos of naked people, and the obligatory image of the writer with his or her camera, the only white person in sight. Each of those articles starts from the perspective of the intrepid traveler. The European who lived in shocking conditions to get to these remote places and despite the hardships found a wondrous exotic world. One that is always disappearing, and one that is always facing disaster.
I write this and I imagine readers finding this so known, such an old and obvious critique. Of course it’s racist, of course it’s colonial! But is this easily distinguished in the world we live in? Isn’t the temptation of travel and wondrous and vanishing people still the currency we live in? Hasn’t the framework stayed the same, while tweaks and reforms within it have happened? We can no longer use a caption that calls a woman a beauty, and now there are some black writers at National Geographic. But isn’t it the same story still being told over and over again?
It feels impossible to use images of people from these magazines. The idea of cutting them up, detaching them from the little context that was granted them within their frames, and then recontextualizing them. So I cut out the landscapes, which I gravitate towards anyway. I cut them up along perspectives, along natural features, along ridges, along foregrounds. To me, the perspective changes. They become shapes, and longings, and absences. They become scenes that are no longer complete. They become fragments.
But weren’t they always?
For the last 10 years I’ve been making documentary films. I’ve been capturing things I see and experience, encounters created by my presence with my camera, and then editing them. Editing is, in some ways, a deeply rational experience. It is, or can be, a making sense of disparate elements. Elements which often have no inherent relationship to each other except through the filmmakers encounter, association, curiosity, focus. It can be a way of creating meaning, of creating order, of creating relationships, or as my father used to say, of making shapes.
But editing is also deeply improvisational. It can just as easily be a space where one practices not being in control. A place where words are inadequate, where nothing is knowable, and everything is relational.
Collaging, in its simplest form, is taking found materials, usually images, and cutting them up and rearranging them. It feels similar to documentary editing, and contains a similar joy. One of recognition, of surprise, of creating new ambiguous meanings from disparate things.
It feels strange to put my experience of collage into words, because I gravitate to it specifically because I don’t have to rationalize it, and it doesn’t have to be for anything. I don’t share them, I don’t even glue them. I don’t have a thesis about what I’m drawn to, or why I make them. I do it because I get a very slow and real joy from rearranging elements of the so-called world and discovering what gets created when you put them out of context and into different configurations.
Most recently I’ve been cutting out landscapes and separating the various elements. The cliffs from the sea. The ravine from the river. The foreground from the background. I don’t know why I do this. Some of it surely must have to do with the material I’m working with.
I’ve been using old National Geographics. I got about 150 from a woman named Lee on Craigslist. Here’s what she wrote in an email to me: “My only request is that you re-gift them upon completion of your research to someone who will read and enjoy them.” I wrote back coordinating a time to pick them up, knowing full well that I would not honor her request. And I wondered why she cared.
I grew up on National Geographics, and I wanted to be a photographer for them. The promise of a life of adventure, of spending weeks in the tundra photographing penguins, of traveling to Vietnam and walking amongst the markets.
I flip through the National Geographics and that dream looks more and more nefarious. I notice the articles about Europe with images of nightclubs with captions such as “a beautiful blonde dances after hours”, and images of people fishing and greeting each other in the stores, or playing soccer. And then there are the articles on Africa, with photos of naked people, and the obligatory image of the writer with his or her camera, the only white person in sight. Each of those articles starts from the perspective of the intrepid traveler. The European who lived in shocking conditions to get to these remote places and despite the hardships found a wondrous exotic world. One that is always disappearing, and one that is always facing disaster.
I write this and I imagine readers finding this so known, such an old and obvious critique. Of course it’s racist, of course it’s colonial! But is this easily distinguished in the world we live in? Isn’t the temptation of travel and wondrous and vanishing people still the currency we live in? Hasn’t the framework stayed the same, while tweaks and reforms within it have happened? We can no longer use a caption that calls a woman a beauty, and now there are some black writers at National Geographic. But isn’t it the same story still being told over and over again?
It feels impossible to use images of people from these magazines. The idea of cutting them up, detaching them from the little context that was granted them within their frames, and then recontextualizing them. So I cut out the landscapes, which I gravitate towards anyway. I cut them up along perspectives, along natural features, along ridges, along foregrounds. To me, the perspective changes. They become shapes, and longings, and absences. They become scenes that are no longer complete. They become fragments.
But weren’t they always?