Archives + Collage: Designed for Each Other <3

As a creative person with limited drawing skills (okay, like, no drawing skills), I turned to collage in order to express myself. I liked cutting existing content into something new. Working as a public historian, archives became the perfect companion for collage-based history projects…

A collage developed from a 1930s "Better Homes & Gardens," magazine featuring advertisements for Midol, Tampax, and Heinz canned spaghetti. 

If you’ve ever worked in an archive, there is an element of intrigue—a possibility of endless discovery. You never know what you’ll find, whether it’s a 54 year old Jell-o recipe, or a preserved human hand (depending on where you’re working, of course, these aren’t just lying around everywhere). In graduate school, I had the opportunity to both work and research in image-based archives, at local historical societies and major institutions like the Library of Congress. I was struck by the excess of images, many of which I’d never seen. I knew the public had never encountered the majority of these photographs, which depicted daily life from centuries past. Peeling advertisements, kids in snow, old-fashioned cars on long-demolished roads. The quantity and quality of these images amazed me, and I wanted to use them in a new way. I wanted to try to move them together in a creative experiment; I wanted to make a collage.

What started as a silly hobby soon became a more streamlined project, with my interest in the art form growing as I realized the potential that collage has to make archives more accessible, and more fun. The goal of archive-based collage is to allow people to casually interact with the past, through the ease of image-based work. There are many ways to interpret archival contents, but in order to use them, they need to be freed from the chilly back rooms and digital prisons that they live in. Bringing archival images back into the public view is essential as a way to publicize the importance of archives and their incredible capacity to record our shared history.

So if you’re an archivist, or even just like to make collages, I’d give it a try. You might learn something new about the past, and at the very least, you’ll get to express your own creativity in a new way.

I am continuing to experiment with this art form, and will be sure to update the website when I have more products to share.