Midterm Collage Project


For my collage topic, I’ve chosen the invention of the motion picture as an important historical event which has had a profound impact on perceived cultural knowledge. To do this topic justice, I would have needed a much larger space to incorporate the many, many relevant images that I found. I decided for the purposes of this project to focus on a couple of key events in which we have seen the most interaction between motion picture (in these cases, T.V.) characters and real public figures. I thought it especially ironic that in these case, the public figures are politicians. The day that I did the final work on this project, the Mercury News published an article in which it quoted a study that said 1/3 of Americans believe in ghosts. I think it can be difficult at times to discount the visual memories we have of "seeing" ghosts so many times in a motion picture.

To create the collage, I composited images from seven digital sources. I scanned and used the article from the Mercury News. The other news sources were from the Internet; I printed these and sat on them a few times to give them a slightly aged look, then scanned them to use in the collage. The background image is of the back of a yellowed and aged Kodak print. I used some free, downloadable brush sets for the images of handwriting and the Victorian ladies.