Chapter 3 | COLLAGES WITH A BACKGROUND
In a collage with depth/perspective you usually work from background to foreground. In the first example I chose one cut-out picture as background, a blue sky with light rays from a magazine. On top of that I pasted three fragments from different images. I like to combine images like this that originally did not belong together at all. In this way you can create a ‘surrealistic’ strange world that still looks realistic. A collage with only fragments of photos like in this example is also called a photomontage.
Exercise 1: Try making a collage by starting with a background and pasting two or more fragments over it.
In the following black and white collage by a student, the background is not one picture as in the first example, but consists of several fragments. At first glance, this collage looks like a regular photo, but don’t be mistaken; many different fragments have been merged! The photos in the frames are from different images and the woman’s dress has been cut out of the photo of a bridge. At the top left, another part of the same bridge has been used.
Exercise 2: try to create a collage where even the background consists of merged fragments. Try out combinations before sticking the fragments. Sometimes you get the most beautiful and surprising combinations by chance. The nice thing is that a collage usually looks very realistic. Use sturdy paper or even cardboard.
For the last collage I scanned the woman from the student collage and cut her out again. Then I placed her in a new collage in a different environment. The background is made of newspaper clippings/torn fragments.
