Collage and My Relationship to Paper

The last time I made a collage was in grammar school. In fact, I thought collage was more of a schoolhouse craft than a serious art medium. Little did I know.

I’ve been exploring other mediums lately and collage is quickly becoming a favorite. I’ve been sorting through old magazine clippings and it struck me that I haven’t read a physical magazine in over 15 years.

Magazines were once my favorite periodical. Like many preteens in the 90s I cut out pictures of my favorite celebrities and taped them on my wall. At age 12, I found out my local newsstand was carrying a Mexican teen magazine called tú, which featured stories of girls from all over Latin America and included a classified section with email addresses of young girls looking for pen pals I read Astronomy magazine religiously at age 14. I became an avid collector of Vogue. The most memorable issue I ever purchased was an edition of Vogue France on a visit to Paris in college, and it came with a CD mix that sounded of pure summer bliss. To this day, whenever I think of Paris, I think of the Bebel Gilberto remix of “Bob” by the Brazilian singer Otto, a song I first heard on that mix. Twenty years on and it’s still the song of the summer.

Magazines felt authoritative, contemporary, and posh. There was nothing quite like them. I loved features that took me places, I loved well-composed photographs, and even trendy ads (again Vogue). They made you want to flip through their pages.

Thumbing through clippings I got to revisit something I’ve lost as evermore things get swallowed up into my phone: the tactile nature of reading and consuming information. The internet has no shortage of pretty photos and ads and feature stories but they come at us at high velocity. There’s nothing tactile about it. No mechanism for pacing how we scroll.

Making a collage takes time. It forces you to stop and consider what you see in front of you. To change its shape, to rearrange it, to cut and paste. It’s contemplative in a world that is fast forgetting what contemplation means. Print media is sadly disappearing and changing in ways I never would have thought as a teenager 25 years ago. But at least for a few hours I got the opportunity to contemplate why they were so important in my life.