Collage

Collage in photography is the technique of cutting photographic prints or printed reproductions and gluing the fragments onto a support, so that the separate pieces and their edges remain visible in the finished work. The word comes from the French coller, "to glue," and as an artists' technique it is usually dated to the papiers collés of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in 1912. Photographic collage is older. In the 1860s and 1870s, aristocratic Victorian women cut up carte-de-visite portraits and set them within painted and drawn scenes in their albums. From around 1918 the Berlin Dadaists cut photographs from newspapers and illustrated magazines, calling the result photomontage partly to distinguish it from Cubist papier collé.

In practice, a collage is made with scissors or a scalpel, adhesive and card, and its sources range from the photographer's own prints to found snapshots, postcards, magazine pages and film stills. Fragments may be combined with drawing, paint or typography, and abrupt shifts of scale, perspective and tone stay in view. Many collages remain unique pasted objects rather than being rephotographed. David Hockney's "joiners," begun in 1982, assembled Polaroids and later 35mm prints of one scene taken from shifting viewpoints and at slightly different moments, a patchwork he related to Cubism.

The terminology is unstable. Dada photomontage originally included hand-cut pasted work, but the term later narrowed to seamless composites made in the darkroom or by rephotographing a pasted original, and collage is now often reserved for work whose joins stay visible. Museum vocabularies draw a similar line, calling an assembly montage when its fragments form a somewhat unified image. Collage also differs from Combination Printing, which joins several negatives into a single photographic print.