What do you do with a shoebox full of family photos?

As a poet, I began my hybrid arts practice with Elmer’s glue, Crayola finger-paints, Microsoft Word, and no formal training. My grandmother was murdered, I needed a form for the story, and I just had all of these artifacts of her life and death in my hands. I had no money or resources, so I used what I could find around my apartment to create collage and work on my then-beginning project, holly, which is as much a book as it is an art object or a collection of artifacts. 

At my residency at Mass MoCA last April, I borrowed a small set of professional watercolors for the first time—and it changed everything. The mere depth and quality of my work increased more than I could’ve imagined, and all because of resources. It became clear to me how important it is to have access to resources, and it also became clear to me that many are not able to access them. 

I know that art can be simple and still be powerful. However, even simplicity is a resourced thing. At this time, I still have little professional equipment, but I’ve been teaching myself how to do basic things with paper and paint and thread and Microsoft Word for a few years now. I’m grateful for where this has taken me. 

Writers and thinkers have been the biggest tools in developing my own hybrid image and text practice. I’ve read volumes of theory on collage practice and text:image relationships, and have leaned on books by writers who use images and visual poetics (most recently, work by Victoria Chang and Renee Gladman). I have scoured the archives for artists who use what is around them (Katrien de Blauwer), and writers who have no training in the visual arts (more than you’d think). I went from being frustrated by my lack of resources and tools to seeing these limitations as interesting and helpful constraints for creative work, and I hope, by teaching, I can offer this insight to others.

Much of this course was spent discussing the “personal artifact,” perhaps family photos, or letters from loved ones, or objects from the deceased. Many times, we are inundated with a wealth of these artifacts all at once, along with a story that needs a proper container. In the nature of people leaving, however they might be doing so, it is often sudden and overwhelming. Perhaps someone has passed away, and now you have their entire family photo collection, or stamp collection, or their journals from high school. Works like Nox by Anne Carson, Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen, and Bough Down by Karen Green attest to this—when suddenly dealing with these artifacts, the maker must ask, how in the world can I tell this story? What form could hold all of this? 

Our personal artifacts in hand, I proposed that we do three things: 

1) engage deeply with and discuss our model theorists as well as some model artists (including collages from Graham Rawle, Katrien de Blauwer, Arnold Baretto, and more),

2) go step by step through a demo on creating digital collage using Microsoft Word or other word processing software, and 

3) have a generative playground space, where students can respond to guiding prompts as they practice their new skills. 

For any course, I am a firm believer in learning basic theory of practice before we produce. I always introduce theory as a frame for makers to think about their work, because much of accessibility is offering the core of an idea, and allowing the application to take many forms based on what each maker has, or needs, or is inspired by. In this particular course, I used collage theorist and professor David Banash’s theory that collage is a dialectic of critique and nostalgia to frame how we think of collage and its techniques. “In the cuts,” he says, “there is always critique, a rupture, but every collage is also a nostalgic work of preservation [especially in a capitalist culture full of readymades]. Different artists tend to emphasize one desire or the other.” 

When we create collage in whatever form as writers or as artists, what are we enacting? If we think of collage as an image in a context that you create, we can then think of both the work and the maker’s role in creating it. The collage is polyvocal in this way. You have the voice of the maker in the present, which has an undeniable amount of knowledge and power in dealing with the voices of the past. With collage, we are often re-remembering, re-contextualizing, re-imagining history, the present, or the future. The maker superimposes meaning, symbol, metaphor, language and reclaims power over the memory, whether in criticism or in an attempt at preservation or both. This makes collage an excellent form for those who are suddenly holding a shoebox of family photos, or staring down an obscure spoon collection, or standing in an entire house they must pack up and sift through. It gives us a form that allows for nuance, pause, and polyvocality, which can be difficult to achieve only with writing. It gives us a genuine space to sit and converse with memory.

To acknowledge and harness the power we hold as makers to manipulate context, I also used Tina Campt’s introduction from her book Listening to Images to offer students a framework for engaging with haptic images and objects prior to manipulating them. 

“To a physicist, audiologist, or musicologist, sound consists of more than what we hear,” Campt writes in the introduction. “It is constituted primarily by vibration. The lower frequencies of these images register as what I describe as ‘felt sound,’ sound that, like a hum, resonates in and as vibration.” 

Campt’s work explores historical documentation and identification photography of Black subjects. She explores agency through postcolonial and identity theory, and offers unconventional “readings” of images through this felt sound.

So what does it look like to listen to an image, an artifact? 

In my own work, I often create a space in which I can put my voice on the plane of the artifact. My grandmother was murdered in 1976. Sometimes I light candles, or listen to a playlist of top hits from that year. You might call this divination, but really, it’s conversation. What is this image telling me beyond what I see? What exists in the anticipatory space around the image—what might happen next, or what happened before? What do I know that the subject does not—and how am I imposing this knowledge? What is still, what is in motion? Why was this photo taken? Why was it preserved? 

Attunement is a great place to begin a collage practice. When the maker is attuned to an artifact, they can then begin their act of cutting, or their act of preservation, or, for most, something in between—the act of creating a re-history. 

My goal with this course was for students to think of the poetics of the image in new ways. The process of creating collage is quite simple when it stems from a deep understanding of the artifact, and of the voices at play in the manipulation of the artifact. This is where we come back to access. Collage technique is important, sure, but engaging the muscle of hybridity in new ways is what will help the maker relay the different frequencies of a story and help them to “find the form” of their project. 

And that’s half the battle, isn’t it? Just finding a place to put this all down?

Generative Playground

Since I can’t demonstrate digital collage techniques through this asynchronous learning prompt, I will offer a generative writing prompt for manipulating a personal artifact using mixed media.

This prompt is based on Victoria Chang’s Dear Memory, which is an excellent resource for hybrid poets.

Your first step is to print out a copy of a personal artifact. A photo, a letter. You can use the real copy, but only if you are okay with cutting it up. 

Your goal? Using basic materials (whatever you have lying around), create a mixed media collage that interrogates a personal or familial memory. You may choose one of the following prompts, or both, to create a sequence. 

1. NOSTALGIA (after Victoria Chang): Create a collage in which you ask a question of the memory, and overlay this question on a personal photograph or artifact. 
   
   Guiding questions: What can you attune to in the image by using your senses? What do you know about the image that the image itself does not know? What would using past tense do to the relationship between your voice and the memory’s voice? What about present tense? Where should your voice be located in relation to the memory’s voice—does it obscure the subject, surround it, does it stay in the margins? What is the question you are most afraid to ask? What if you asked it?


2. CRITIQUE (after Victoria Chang): Create a collage in which you cut out the subject of the artifact. Replace the subject with whatever it is that separates you from the subject—be it grief, time, an event, language, etc. When finished, add color, your own voice, or other objects to create a polyvocal piece.

 

Further Resources:

After class, I always have my students compile a list of resources for a class reading list. Here are just some of the class-compiled recommendations for hybrid works of text and personal artifact:

• Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen (poetry)
• Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman (personal and archive)
• Descent by Lauren Russell (poetry, hybrid)
• Dear Memory by Victoria Chang (poetry)
• Nox by Anne Carson (memoir, hybrid)
• Bough Down by Karen Green (poetry, hybrid)
• Under the Knife by Krista Franklin (poetry, memoir, hybrid)