Collage problems

Nothing you can’t fix with a photocopier

Hey y’all,

Collage is where I go to calm down and process what’s going on in my head. Simply gluing one thing to another, seeing what appears. (It helps to have good music playing. I made everything in this email while listening to the band Big Thief. I especially like their album U.F.O.F.)

This weekend I made a bunch of collages using a variation of “The Simplest Cut” method I wrote about a few weeks ago: I cut out a picture of a camera from an old ad in National Geographic and started using it as a mask on every good image in the issue I could find. The problem was, I couldn’t decide which image to actually glue the mask to:

@austinkleonCollage problems #collage

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

Several people said, “Hey genius, use the technology people have been using for half a century: a photocopier!” Others suggested digital collage, but I resist digital until the very end — I like to have my actual hands on the work until it’s appeared.

So I scanned the image, made a sheet of them in Photoshop (scroll down for a link to a shared PDF), printed them on my ancient laser printer, and cut them out:

Then I went to town in my diary:

None of this is supposed to be “serious” work, by the way: it’s all just about play, being silly, letting things happen. (What I’ve learned is that often things done merely for your own amusement can turn into something bigger.)