Our lives are like a collage, disparate pieces jammed together sometimes making sense and beauty and sometimes just expressing the frustrating randomness of our situation. Collage seems obvious, even a cliche, something we do when we create vision boards or Pinterest accounts. Collage is so incorporated in our lives we (at least me) don’t think much about it. But the use of collage to express the world had to come from somewhere and from some specific time. And it wasn’t on cave walls.
What is collage?
A French word meaning to glue or stick together. This is not exclusive to the visual arts. Collage is used in music as well as literature as we will see.
As you may have expected, it all began with photography and advertising.
In the mid 19th century, newspapers increased in popularity fueled by rising literacy rates, the invention of the middle class, and cheaper paper and printing. Along with an increase in newspapers and magazines was an increase in advertising jammed carelessly against editorials and news. The result was pages filled with random and compelling images. Sound familiar? We don’t even notice but every art form has a beginning – collage started with photography and young women. Photography rose to prominence in the mid- nineteenth century and was quickly and completely embraced by the growing middle class. The first photograph is credited to Joseph Nicephore, a Frenchman who took a shot of his estate from a window in 1826. By 1854 photographs were routinely created as Carte de Visite – your social media profile on a card. These business card size photographs replaced the traditional calling card and quickly became – yes – collectables. Friends saved these small photographs, traded them, and hoarded them as proof of growing friends and likes. Who was doing this? Victorian aristocracy and middle class ladies.
Sixty years before the avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century,Victorian women were already experimenting with photo collage. The compositions they made with photographs and watercolors are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects. The women who created albums of these collages, took some of the seriousness out of the photographed images by placing say, the head of Queen Victoria onto a duck.
That was the beginning and we are still playing with the ideas and variations of collage both visually as well as through poetry (most accessible) and novels (in some novels – impossible to read).
To inspire you, here are a few of the collages I’m creating using my iPhone and iPad with ProCreate. It’s not as easy as it looked when I first tried it, there is a learning curve. But like early collagists like Constance Sackville-West, I’m enjoying the process and the creativity.
