Holiday Collage

Portokalada
Mythos
Maleme
No parking
Enoikiazeta
Gerani
Well, here we are, the summer has gone and I've entered no new posts for a few months. I could say it was due to a series of serious family illnesses - which did contribute - but equally I have not felt focussed enough to update my blog with  the work I have been doing over the summer.

Whilst away on holiday in Crete I managed to make a collage on most days from found ephemera. As most of the holiday included a good deal of eating/drinking, a good deal of the ephemera came from these sources. Building collage from current ephemera gives a completely different visual aesthetic to that of collage from found ephemera from the past. The fact that the 'historic ephemera' has already had its lifetime will have something to do with this, although I am still endeavouring to determine, or to be able to describe this phenomenon.

In addition to the collages I took a range of photographs, aiming to frame graphic elements of street 'art'; zooming in on areas of signs, doors, walls, anything that allowed me to 'viewfind' a balanced image. This approach feels similar to defining balance and content in the building  of collage. The key here though, is to aim to capture that image through the viewfinder rather than cropping and zooming later on when working on the computer. I have begun to print some of these outcomes at high resolution on a photographic quality printre - printing with 8 cartridges instead of the normal 4 - to achieve better contrast and colour balance.

I have included a small selection of images here as an example of these collages and photo's.