Putting the edge on
Last week at ICP we ran with Collage/Montage again. This is one of my favorite ways to teach. Basically it's like finger painting. We throw ideas on the table from many different directions -- that is, pictures from the history of collage and montage, pictures from today, Photoshop techniques, darkroom techniques -- and then cajole folks into letting their intuition loose. Headless Barbie on the scanner. By the end of the week we were zooming back and forth between the computer lab, the black & white darkroom, and the color darkroom. People were scanning and printing and rescanning. Stuff was getting cut up, recombined, and then re-cut up. An inkjet negative getting ready for the darkroom. The organizing question at the root of this workshop is about the role of the edge of the picture within the picture itself. When you shoot a photography, what do you include inside the frame? What do you exclude? Normally that boundary is invisible (we don't think about the stu...