Observations, Editorial, v01
I recently stumbled across the work of Nigel Poor, specifically her San Quentin Project. There are dozens of ways to interact with a project this interesting and layered, but my two immediate reactions were, "I love how the annotated photographs look", and "this is someone doing a ten list based on a photograph." Arguably these are both extremely reductive. There is a lot more going on here, and I'm getting a copy of the book so that I can properly give it my attention. Until I get the book though, I want to take the very simple idea of looking closely at a photograph (collage) and documenting what I see in it.
I decided to start with this recent series of collages called "Observations, Editorial". Working on it, I let myself be influenced by editorial illustration. You see a lot of collage in contemporary editorial illustration. I think because it's relatively inexpensive, efficient - measured in time to make a digital photo-based collage, and evocative. Photographs have a primacy that make them different from drawn or painted images (insert a bookmark to talk about what AI-generated images are doing to to our thoughts about photography, maybe include an image of the Pope wearing Balenciaga).
It was a week or so after I finished this series that I found the San Quentin Project. Below are the seven collages, and a ten list written about each of them. In the original San Quentin Project there was no mandate to notice a certain number of of things per photograph. I'm capping it at ten because lists of ten things is kind of my thing.
First post of two.
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1. The top bit is a postcard. You can see the horizontal marks of a postage stamp (not the stamp you buy in the store, but the stamp the US post office puts on a letter when they process it) in the top left corner. There's abrasion in this corner, maybe from processing?
2. The postcard image isn't a photograph, but probably a photo-lithograph, which was common through the early 1900s in the US, where this postcard is from.
3. The large black and white image could be the roof of a wooden building looking over some water. It's unclear if the image is shown in its original orientation or not. I didn't crop it at an angle, so it's either rotated 0, 90, 180, or 270 degrees. Would it be interesting to crop more images at unexpected angles?
4. The vertical black shape is from me rolling out used ink from a linoleum print onto found paper. The texture is great, but not planned.
5. One of my favorite parts of this image is where the black intersects with the angle of the roof(?) and then how it extends just a bit beyond the horizontal edge of the blue shape. When making images you're frequently warned to look out for "tangents". This feels to me like a tanget that got away. It "should" be lined up, right? But it's not. And that's the way I like it.
6. The blue shape at the bottom is almost certainly water, and likely rotated 90 degree clockwise.
7. The printing technique in his image is more advanced than that used in the postcard.
8. I like the blue sky echoing the blue water. If this was a digital collage, I would at least try color matching the two blues. That's not an option in analog collage. You have to choose your elements carefully.
9. Why is the middle and bottom-left empty? It's unbalanced! Something needs to be there! Screw that. It's awesome. You tell me what would be better there. Better yet, make your own version with something there.
10. Overall it's three views of nature, and big blank space of man-made paper. Each of the three "full" images were once blank paper, unprinted, waiting for content. What's more interesting, paper that's full or paper that's waiting for you?
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1. Three things jump out at me immediately from this collage: the red dot, the ragged edge on the left that extends beyond the clean edge, and the way there's a white frame around the bottom left, and bottom edges.
2. The map element is rotated 180 degrees and show the Swiss Alps. The Matterhorn is shown right on the border.
3. The photographic image is of a mountain range, but not the Alps. It's from a book about mountaineering in Czech (I think. I need to double check).
4. The red dot doesn't "mean" anything, but it plays nicely off the person standing alone on a trail. If this were a digital collage, I'd try moving the person a bit more to the left, to balance the dot a bit better. It's amazing that I don't have that ability here (although maybe it would look interesting to cut them out, move them left and find something else to fill in the space).
5. The black and white, somewhat out-of-focus quality makes me draw a line between the picture of the one person and pictures of Sasquatch.
6. The letters in the typographic element are "W" and "G". I only know the second is a G because I made it. Otherwise it could easily be an O, or a Q.
7. "Kombinat" means "combination"
8. Shorthand (Kurzschrift in German) looks like nonense to me. I love the way the scraps of it work as collage elements.
9. The clean column lines in the Kurzschrift book slightly echo the clean line of the white page border.
10. The tiniest bit of blue in the map references the big typographic element nicely.
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1. The title comes from a titlecard to Charlie Chaplin's film "The Gold Rush". It's a reference to a painting called "Man propses God disposes" by Edwin Landseer about a failed British Arctic expedition.
2. The canoeing postcard, the black-and-white whitewater image, and the blue ink on found paper all seem to reference each other in a chaotic, not quite circular way. The canoe being cut-off by the black of the whitewater doesn't bode well for the canoeists.
3. The three strong visual elements (the ones that aren't the letter) all feature differently-sized frames. The way they don't ever quite line up throws the otherwise contained composition out of balance.
4. The baseline of the last line of writing in the letter nearly lines up with the left edge of the whitewater image.
5. One of the few words I can read with any certainty is "Ordnung", which means "order." This story in this collage seems to be about a loss of order.
6. An image, maybe a feather, is printed on the paper underneath the blue ink.
7. I don't know much about Druid Hill Park in Maryland, but my mom grew up in or near the Druid Hills neighborhood of Atlanta, GA. I've been there multiple times.
8. The vertical height of the canoeing element is very close to the vertical height from the bottom of the border of the blue-printed page to the top of the whitewater page.
9. The composition isn't divided in either the vertical or horizontal center.
10. The angled tear of the letter intensifies the threat of the storm to the canoeists.