Collection as Collage
What should we know about this product? How is it made, how much does it cost, what color and size is it? Better descriptions result in more sales.
Collage is the deliberate erasing of edges between colleted elements and building connections between them
Niederdeutsche Madonnen, 1941, photographs by Alfred Erhardt.
Niederdeutsche Madonnen is a book of 120 photographs of 9th Century Madonna sculptures from northeastern Germany by Alfred Erhardt.
Erhardt was influenced by the Neue Sachlichkeit movement that emerged as a reaction against the “excesses” of expressionism and sought a more sober and objective form of visual art. Even with objectivity as a goal, a photographer’s choices of composition and lighting are creative ones.
And when collected in the form of a book or exhibition, the order in which the images are presented actively suggests a narrative and guides the reader from visual idea to visual idea.
The images are naturally connected by subject matter, time period, and geography, but are also connected by the choices of the photographer.
The book is both 120 diverse images and one idea expressed through the connections between them. Collection as collage.
What connections exist between collages sharing source material?
