A well known curator once said that the problem with collage was that it’s too easy to make a decent one, while it’s almost impossible to create something great. Whether or not I am misremembering or paraphrasing I am not sure. But collage seems easy, and the fact that it lends itself to exercises in graphic design certainly does not help.
Over the years, I have seen a few good books about collage — but nothing great, nothing providing deeper insight of any sorts (besides, possibly, here and there very minor art history which often is mixed with some surface-level knowledge of world history). But now there is Cut Out, subtitled A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage, by Fiona Rogers (a photography curator at London’s V&A).
“Art history,” Rogers writes, “suggests a habitual, inherently gendered separation of collage techniques: the conceptual ‘high’ art for by Picasso and Georges Braque in 1912, and the ‘low’ craft or hobby version, defined by an aesthetic or technique and (mostly) practiced by women. The erasure of these latter forms combined with the repetitive, self-perpetuating nature of art history (and those who write it) ensures that such distinctions are upheld and maintained.”
And thus Rogers proceeds to set the record straight, not only by centering the many contributions by women artists (some of them in my book the defining collage artists) but by also compiling a proper art-historical survey of collage from its very beginnings up until the present time.
I particularly enjoyed the book’s broadening of the idea of collage and its practitioners both in the relatively distant past and in the present immensely.
You might wonder about collage in this day and age where everything has seemingly gone digital and where print media — once the main source of material for collages — have been hugely diminished.
But collage is a principle more than a set of laws, and in the hands of someone with talent and a vision, everything can be brought into the present.
As is usually the case with surveys, Cut Out is structured through a series of chapters (that come with an introduction by Rogers), with supplementary, slightly more detailed study cases added (these feature introductions/text by a variety of authors).
The V&A collection forms the reservoir from which Rogers extracts the material in the book. No doubt there are holes in that collection. However, as is the case with every survey book, someone will always miss something and/or question the inclusion of something else.
In any case, the strength of a survey book is not necessarily formed by the richness of its source material (even though it is rich here [I am unable to decide whether the pun is intended or not) but by the framework the curator manages to construct around it.
The framework constructed by Rogers is very strong, enabling a viewer/reader to approach the broader landscape of collage with a much wider view for its potential, its possibilities, and the various underlying strata that might determine how or why we see what we see.
This is what for me forms the backbone of a survey book: it should not necessarily feed me with data — names and the like (even though it certainly is wonderful to have this aspect provided as well). Instead, I expect it to enable me to see and understand more widely.
The moment you make someone not only see but understand more widely, you allow them to question their own ideas, effectively outsourcing the discussion around the inclusion and/or exclusion of someone.
In other words, a good survey book is less a lecture for a passive audience than an introduction to a (hopefully) shared passion of inquiry.
And this is an excellent survey book that, I suspect, might form the basis for how collage will be discussed for a long time.
Crucially, the book provides the only possible retort to the assertion I started out this article with: yes, collage looks easy (I mean, come on now, photographers, pressing a shutter button is even less work), yes, it is very much possible to make great collages, and yes, collage can be an incredible medium to speak about aspects of our troubled times.
As the artists featured in the later sections demonstrate, the potential of collage art has not yet been fully explored, and it probably never will be. This fact provides an opening for anyone for whom photography on its own might be too limiting.
And it doesn’t really matter how exactly you might go about making your collages — whether digitally or in a physical fashion — as long as you manage to not only give expression to what drives you but also push the boundaries of expression itself. I suspect that it is especially the latter that might surprise many viewers/readers unfamiliar with, say, Dafna Talmor, Sheida Soleimani, or Cecilia Mandrile.
Recommended.
Cut Out: A Feminist History of Photo Collage, Montage and Assemblage; with essays by Fiona Rogers (ed.), Damarice Amao, Matthew Biro, Justine Kurland, Melissa Meyer, Renée Mussai, Pelumi Odubanjo, Alona Pardo, Tania Sanabria; 240 pages; Thames & Hudson; 2026
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