About Collage

But Where Will Tomorrow's Collage Material Come From?

This is a question I have become increasingly interested in.

For generations, illustrated magazines provided collage artists with an extraordinary and constantly changing visual library. Fashion, interiors, travel, architecture, advertising, photography, nature and everyday objects arrived together in the same physical package. Artists did not have to know exactly what they were looking for. They could browse until something caught their attention.

As print culture changes, that source is becoming less dependable. The world certainly does not suffer from a shortage of images. Quite the opposite. We probably encounter more images in a day than previous generations encountered in weeks. The problem is that increasingly those images live behind glass.

We can see them, but we cannot put scissors through them.

I do not think the answer is to declare analog collage finished. I think collage needs to do what it has always done remarkably well: adapt.

Old magazines and books remain wonderful sources. So do catalogues, packaging, personal photographs, discarded printed material and ephemera. Digital photography creates another enormous source. Images can also be legally sourced or created digitally, printed onto paper and returned to the physical worktable.

And now there is AI.

Could AI Help Preserve an Analog Art?

At first that sounds almost contradictory. Generative AI is associated with a rapidly expanding digital world, while analogue collage is among the most tactile of visual practices. Yet the relationship becomes more interesting when AI is treated not as the creator of the finished artwork but as a source of raw material.

Suppose I need an unusual red flower photographed from a very specific angle. In the past, I might have searched through dozens of magazines hoping eventually to encounter one. Today I can potentially create a source image, print it, cut out the part I need and place that fragment beside completely unrelated physical material.

The AI images has not made the collage. It has supplied a piece.

The artistic decisions still happen at the table: what to keep, what to discard, how much to cut away, what to combine it with, whether to rotate it, cover part of it, change its scale or place it somewhere it could never exist. The scissors return authorship to the physical table.

There is, however, something we should be careful not to lose. Traditional collage hunting contains serendipity. When we browse old magazines without knowing what we need, we encounter things we would never have thought to request. AI can become too obedient. If we generate only exactly what we already imagine, our source library may become narrower rather than richer.

The future of collage may therefore depend on preserving both abilities.

The traditional collage artist asks: what can I do with what I found?

The contemporary collage artist can also ask: what image I need to make?

Neither question needs to replace the other.

Collage Is a Way of Seeing

This may ultimately be why I believe analog collage is worth preserving.

The materials will change. Magazines may become rarer. Printing technologies will change. Digital archives will grow. AI will produce imagery we could not previously have found or photographed. Some artists will work entirely digitally, others entirely physically, and many will move back and forth between the two.

But collage is larger than its materials.

It teaches us to look at something without accepting the identity it was originally given. A photograph can be dismantled. Scale can be ignored. Context can be replaced. An ordinary object can acquire another life simply because of what we place beside it.

Perhaps that is why collage remains so fascinating after more than a century of modern experimentation. Picasso and Braque's decision to introduce pieces of the real world into their compositions helped change Western art in 1912, but the possibilities of that deceptively simple act are nowhere near exhausted.

There will always be new images. There will always be old images waiting to be rediscovered. There will always be fragments that seem useless until they encounter the right stranger.

And as long as someone is willing to cut those fragments out, move them around a table and ask “What happens if these two things meet?”, analog collage still has a future.

There is something wonderfully strange about collage. A painter begins with a surface and gradually adds paint. A photographer captures something that, at least for a fraction of a second, existed in front of the camera. A collage artist works differently. We take things that already exist, remove them from the worlds where they belonged, and introduce them to things they were never supposed to meet.

A rose is simply a rose until it appears beside a skyscraper. A fish is perfectly ordinary until it becomes larger than the city beneath it. A fragment of fabric may stop being fabric once it is cut away from the dress it originally belonged to. An eye, a doorway, a cloud, a machine part and a piece of architecture can lose their original identities completely when they are brought together.

For me, this is at the heart of collage art: putting together things that never belonged together and discovering what happens when they meet.

The result can be beautiful, disturbing, funny, mysterious or impossible to explain. Sometimes the combination creates a meaning the artist did not consciously intend. Two perfectly ordinary images can produce a third idea that existed in neither of them.

That is where collage becomes much more than cutting and gluing.

An Art Form Born From Disruption

Although people had been combining and pasting materials for centuries, collage became a revolutionary part of modern Western art in the early twentieth century. In 1912, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began incorporating materials such as printed paper, newspaper, wallpaper and patterned surfaces into their work. MoMA describes the development of collage and papier collé during this period as a radical shift because real materials and textures were suddenly entering an artistic space that had traditionally represented such things through drawing and painting.

It was a remarkably simple act with enormous consequences. Instead of painting something that looked like newspaper, an artist could simply put newspaper into the artwork.

The outside world had entered the picture.

That relationship with existing visual culture would become one of collage's great strengths. Decades later, artists would continue borrowing from advertising, photography, newspapers, magazines, packaging, popular culture and other sources. MoMA has described Picasso's incorporation of newspaper into his work as initiating a dialogue with popular culture that continued through subsequent generations of artists.

Yet the significance of collage has never depended entirely on what material is used. Its deeper power lies in what happens when the material is removed from its original context.

A photograph in a magazine was created for a particular reason. Perhaps it was intended to sell perfume, illustrate a travel article, show a fashionable interior or accompany a news story. The collage artist is under absolutely no obligation to respect that purpose.

We can cut away everything except a hand. We can keep the shadow and discard the object creating it. We can turn a piece of clothing into a landscape or architecture into part of a human body. We can take an image that once communicated luxury and make it communicate loneliness, absurdity or humour.

The source image has a history, but it does not control its future.

Learning to See What Isn't There

One of the most interesting things that happens when you make collage for a long time is that you gradually stop looking at images in quite the same way.

Someone else may look through a magazine and see a handbag, a chair, a landscape and a woman wearing an evening dress. A collage artist may see possibilities hidden inside all four. The handbag contains a beautiful curve and a piece of reflective metal. The chair casts an interesting shadow. The landscape contains a narrow strip of extraordinary sky. One fold of the evening dress looks surprisingly like moving water.

None of those things was the reason the photograph was originally created.

That ability to recognize something different inside an existing image is one of the real skills of collage, and it develops quietly. Eventually the question becomes less What is this a picture of? and more What else could this become?

This is also why collage does not require traditional drawing or painting skills before someone can begin. That does not make collage easy. The difficulty simply lives somewhere else. Composition, scale, colour, visual rhythm, cutting, juxtaposition and the ability to recognize possibilities all become part of the artist's language.

A technically perfect cut will not rescue an uninteresting idea, while a strange combination of imperfectly cut pieces can sometimes produce an unforgettable image.

The Importance of the Unexpected

The temptation when learning almost any creative activity is to try to make something beautiful. Collage becomes considerably more interesting when beauty stops being the only objective.

Put together things that make sense and the viewer understands the image quickly. Put together things that should have nothing to do with one another and the mind begins looking for a relationship.

Why is that enormous flower growing through a building? Why is the horse standing in a room? Why does the woman's dress turn into an ocean? Why is the fish looking through a window?

The viewer starts participating.

This is one of the reasons scale is so powerful in collage. A rose beside a horse may be pleasant. Make the rose larger than the horse and the relationship changes. Add an unrelated mechanical object and suddenly the image may begin suggesting a story, even though nobody deliberately wrote one.

The artist has created the conditions for meaning without necessarily explaining what that meaning must be.

That ambiguity is not a defect. It is one of collage's great pleasures.

The Physical Pleasure of Analog Collage

We now live in a visual culture dominated by screens, and digital collage has opened extraordinary possibilities. I make digital collage myself, and it has become another part of my creative practice. Yet physical collage remains fundamentally different.

Paper has weight. Different papers behave differently under scissors. A glossy magazine photograph reflects light differently from an old book page. Printed colour changes according to the paper beneath it. Cut edges remain physically present. Pieces overlap rather than merely existing on separate digital layers.

Most importantly, physical collage has consequences.

A digital element can be resized endlessly. It can be moved, duplicated, hidden and restored. Physical material asks for decisions. Once something has been cut away, the original image has changed. Once something has been permanently attached, another set of possibilities disappears.

That limitation can be extraordinarily productive.

Working with physical material also introduces accidents. Something falls onto the table beside something else. A fragment gets turned upside down. A piece you intended to throw away suddenly becomes more interesting than the piece you carefully cut out.

The table participates in the process.