Pictures + Collages = Picture/Collages

I’ve been taking a lot of pictures recently. Pictures that exist to stay pictures, mostly. I’ve done this for years and years, but they always end up as something else. I draft them into a collage or a re-captioned image, but nothing for someone to solely focus on. Never “here it is” and the thing be the picture. I’ve taken a lot of these, mostly for “documenting squalor” or something like that. I enjoy things that are falling in, things that have been cruelly subjected to time, or simply disregarded.  I enjoy things with dust on them. New and squeaky and fresh rarely has a story, no personality.

The process for taking these pictures happens between thrift stores runs. Mainly around small towns near Winston-Salem. Places with a lot of dust that won’t come off. Thomasville is great for finding scenes of marvelous decay. When I have the time, I dive the streets looking for anything that pops out. Old houses are great. Factories falling in on themselves are even better, and Thomasville has that, all of Davidson County has that. If the location looks “safe enough,” I’ll get out and compose something. Forcing a picture from a sitting car is difficult, getting one from a moving car is impossible. No one has ever taken a good picture from a moving car! If a junkyard dog is milling about in the background, or a gaggle of sketchy dudes are looking my way, I take the picture and get out of there. I’ve been shot at before, but not for taking pictures. I could hear the bullets going over my head. That sound has stuck with me, and I don’t wish to hear it again. 

On the left is the print. On the right is the picture. 

 

Only once has someone accosted me for taking pictures in this fashion. I was in Myrtle Beach South Carolina, walking up and down a stretch of old beachfront hotels. These were the good ones, the ones with nice signs out front. Small motels built in the 1950’s or 60’s, ones displaced by the giant high rises around them. I’m on the sidewalk. Not on private property. I’m not Robert Frank, I’m just some asshole with a camera enjoying my morning. This woman in a truck rolls up on me and asks what I was doing, then mumbles something about pictures…the message wasn’t clear, but her anger was. It was a quick minute and then she was gone. Five minutes later, as I’ve moved down to another motel, she reappears. Her tone had miraculously changed. She apologized, “Hey, we’re happy for what you guys do” and pretty much drove off. No idea if she owned a motel or was just driving around accosting tourists. I need to find those pictures. I’m sure many of those motels have disappeared by now. A Wings probably replaced them.

For this project, the one where I’m driving around looking for anything that pops up, I have a system. I take pictures and then play around with them digitally. All are taken with my I-phone which is generally more quality consistent than my nicer camera. It’s also always on me. When I edit them, I make them as brittle as a leaf, almost two dimensional. The look I go for is a little more industrial waste than sad Americana. For comparison, I’d prefer if these appear on the front of a nihilistic metal bands record cover than on a twangy Southern singer-songwriter emoting about mama. 

On the left is the print. On the the right is the photo / collage / photo-collage.

 

For a few of these, I dropped a collage on top of the image to give it a little random color, maybe a ghostly body in there. Can you see the yellow pants of a bike rider in the one image? Much of this is made somewhat haphazardly. Randomness is always something I strive for; nothing is ever meticulously placed or composed. I’m no robot. Look at the mistakes. The mistakes, or better yet, “The happy accidents” always make for a better composition. Do you think free jazz maestros go back and fix bum notes? No! They leave them in. I don’t fine-cut my collages, and I don’t perfectly match the digital monsters that come from them. Doing things this way often means you end up with shit, but so does the other process, and the payoff is never as high.

Always with any new path, you start here, and you end up over there. I took a picture, I heavily edited that picture, and then I printed it out. The last part makes it a lot more real to me.  So much of what I do is mix analog with digital. Often, the creation that comes from that marriage languishes as a digital file after you’re done. That’s all well and good, but it feels like a creation stuck in purgatory. Something that you encounter in the real world, see with your eyes, or touch with your hands, makes it real. Ones and zeroes are only waiting to exist. So, I made them real by getting cheap prints of them. I don’t know where you get nice prints, and I’m not sure if nice is for me. I like cheap tools. I like broken ones. I printed these off at Walgreens using a 40% off coupon. Three prints, at 16x20, which was essentially just a large, printed picture like any 4x6, ended up being about $38.00. Not an exorbitant amount of money, but enough to make me think about the purchase.

Wanting to continue seeing how these will turn out, by getting more of them printed, I thought about trying to sale some online. This is never good. I hate having to do this. Whenever you ask for money, people flee as quickly as they can. They’ll take free shit from you for years and years, though. When you come graveling, people won’t even click “like” on what you’ve created. It’s like seeing a homeless person sucking on their socks at the bus stop. Don’t look. Keep moving and he won’t notice us and ask us to join him in the intergalactic senate. As I imagined, no one took the bait. No matter, I’ll keep making these, but I’ll have to be pickier about which ones I print and then lay on a giant pile of shit no one is interested in.

A quick side-note, Miles took pictures of me holding up the prints. I’ve drafted him to take pictures more than once. Although he’s not great at taking just what is needed, he takes enough to get the job done, which coincidentally is my approach to photography. While he was snapping away, Misty got him in the middle of his photo shoot. He’s easy to work with, professional…not bad. I know I’ll end up using him many more times in the future. 

Miles needs something to stand on, but not much. 

 

The Cheese is Old and Moldy

I’ve been rescuing family pictures at my parents’ house.  I often find things here or there when I’m helping my mother de-clutter. The best of these I scan and then share. Some of those scanned pictures will inevitably end up in my creative projects. At some point I should ask folks if they want to be included in these projects. I have no audience, it’s fine. What I’m always looking for are little jewels, things that stand out and depict a particular time. One picture that I recently rescued depicted me at the kitchen sink when I was maybe four or five years old. This would have been 1984, or 1985. While my cute ass was front and center, I was more interested in the décor sitting on the counter behind me. Some of that décor I think I dropped off to Goodwill just last year. It’s vintage now.

A couple weeks ago I found a few boxes I hadn’t seen before, hidden boxes. While most of them were in fine shape, all of them were running the risk of being in peril. The barn they live in wasn’t exactly watertight. In fact, one of the boxes was sitting in water. When I picked that box up, all the pictures inside were completely fused together in a giant, gross brick. I pulled apart big clumps of pictures just to get some air to as many I could salvage. When doing this, I could see a face or an arm appear in the obscured in the moldy images. Although I would have preferred them to be in pristine shape, an opportunity presented itself…another project.

Rescued Pictures 

When I got the piles back to my lab (upstairs makings room) I pulled all of them apart and then set them aside to dry. Once they were somewhat dry a day later, I wiped a few of them down with a towel. Mold has a weird feel if you don’t know. It’s not a good feeling, it’s akin to having a cockroach scurry over your big toe. It’s a dirty eerie feeling. When you get mold on your fingers, you’re no thinking about the positives that mold has contributed to the world like cheese or penicillin, you’re just like… “Eww, mold.” With cheese, I never think about respiratory problems, but with mold it starts creeping into the back of your mind as soon as it appears. I turned on fans. I opened a window. If I had a hazmat suit (why don’t I have one) I would have put it on and made the whole operation look spectacular. I got to get a hazmat suit.

When everything dried for another day, I went through them all, picking out the ones that looked the most eye-catching. So many of them were filled with bright purples and blues. So many patterns swirled around the images much like a hippie’s scarf. For many, the figure had completely disappeared, leaving an impressionistic image. The more I looked, the more I thought about Katrina. I flashed back to a museum visit I made somewhere in the world years ago. In one of the exhibits, they displayed family photos that had floated away during the storm. My rescue effort wasn’t nearly as dramatic, but the image that remained was similar.

I scanned 10-15 of the best ones, focusing on the ones that had family members in them, mainly my two nephews. I figured my family might want to see these. Although I had “cleaned” them up as best I could, they were still kind of gross. The ink wasn’t dry, not exactly, leaving some terrible looking stuff on my scanner that was hard to get off. After scanning, I got prints from Walgreen’s. 4x6’s with a 50% off coupon, can’t beat that. Much cheaper and easier than trying to print them on my own. I cut them into pieces while trying to keep distant faces in the background.

The final product is fine. It worked out ok. I had made something new. I’ve realized time and time again that if I have a grandiose plan in place, one that involves many moving parts and that doesn’t randomly come together, the result is only ok, at best. And fast seems to be the best approach. A convoluted concept I think that’s novel never really works out. In the end, the new collages are like a lot like my others, but with just a little more shine from the high-glossy prints. I tried to fix this by sanding the surface of the collage even more than I normally do, but to no avail. The dreaded “line” was still there. It’s always the line. They look good enough. Saw an idea through and here it is. At least I can get rid of these by sending them to family members so they can leave them in some giant pile and forget them.

Onto the next idea. 

The final makings 

 

The USPS Emailed Me Collage Material

The USPS offered a service a few years back. You sign up, and you get an email with rough scans of the mail that’s coming for that day. Not all the mail, it rarely scans anything larger than a letter. Getting the daily mail spoiled for me while doing my chores isn’t great, but it’s also a slight benefit. So much of my time is spent scanning work and ephemera, so having a robot do it for me feels like a nice treat. It’s like I have an assistant. Can I get a mail-art assistant?

Since signing up, I have received these emails daily and downloaded each scan into a folder on my computer. That’s thousands of scans…thousands. Normally I do them in groups of two or three because it’s a tedious process, one that I’ve continued to do for years without any justification for doing so. Day in and day out, I check my email, download the scans, and then do nothing with the images produced. More than once, I’ve questioned why I haven’t done anything with the images and almost stopped collecting them. I pushed through.

They’re not good images. Their quality isn’t easily usable. The files are tiny. You can’t print them as is, anything you need intense detail for, you scan in the conventional sense.

I collected images in this fashion until January 2026 when I started to use them. It was all so simple, like most things. A whim produces a nice result and then a whim turns into an obsession. It was simple, all I had to do was bring up the images and digitally cut out (this means I can do it at work during my downtime, like this piece of useless writing) what I thought was interesting and then post that to a bigger piece. I started with Cohen’s braincells in mind. Little images to create a bigger story.  

The first thing I did was play around with a bunch of Richard C. images, just the front of the envelopes, just what I receive in the daily email. For him, the front of the envelopes contains so much of the work. On the envelopes you can see his unique style which has been honed after decades of making mail art. I put them together in a larger digital collage. After that, I broke some of his often-used motifs into a type of visual glossary. I cut out a bunch of the elements that make up his work, and I gave them a name. I picked the items that I admired most about his work, the most unique, the most striking. 

Richard C. Visual Glossary 

10 Envelopes Digitally Collaged 

 

As these things go, you do the thing repeatedly to see what you can learn from repetition. I went through my list of over 800 digital scans direct from the USPS and picked out things that stuck out to me and then dropped those into another creation. This could go on forever. A new toy to play with. While I started with Cohen in mind, I’m thinking about moving more towards Klaus Voorman’s Revolver cover. 

Can you find yourself?