Daily practice for week 2 of the current MA module: create a collage each day from magazine images… it just happens to be one of my favourite relaxing pastimes. I don’t do it often but always enjoy it when I do. Partly because I have a large stack of magazines with some lovely photography, artwork, illustration and fascinating articles.
Here’s one I made from an old ‘Condé Nast Traveller’...
There’s so much I love about these images and the feelings they evoke for me: the colours, sometimes saturated, sometimes faded; the pinks and reds with jade and turquoise; the ‘spontaneous moments’ of ‘incidental’ subjects staged and cropped to perfection; ‘vintage holiday moments’. I photographed it on the yellow-formica topped kitchen table that belonged to my parents since the late 1950s – I grew up doing crafts and eating meals here.
Although the images are highly selective and edited, for me they evoke moments of wonder, beauty, sometimes stillness or movement; drawing attention in meditation-like focus to the photographers’ view in that moment.
Through lectures for Falmouth University, cinematographer Adam Laity has given me courage to acknowledge such ephemeral, subjective things as ‘the sublime’ even when it is merely shadows on a sunlight wall, a fresh peach on a white plate [https://www.adamlaity.co.uk/]. Of course most of my collage images are staged, but that needn’t diminish their power to communicate (if by imitation) forms of the sublime.
The collaged images reminded me of a book I have of photos by Jacques Henri Lartigue (above): a fascinating collection of posed and ‘street’ photography from the first half of the 20th Century. I’d like to capture moments like this. [Martine D’ Astier, Ravache, M. and France, P. (2015). Lartigue : life in color. New York, Ny: Abrams.]
As I prepare to travel to Florence next month, I’m learning how to use a new camera and thinking about the type of work I want to create. I want to capture ‘the golden hour’ that Laity refers to, capture the breathtaking Renaissance vision, but I also want to record my experience of Florence… the small incidental moments of time and space, light and shadow.
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