When I make a collage, I wouldn't say I like to cut up the original images (unless it's my negatives, which I'm ruthless about). I especially don't want to spoil old magazines. That's why I work with photocopies (or scans) of magazines to create collages. Sometimes I print these photos on paper, and sometimes I don't. In this project, I show how I work on digital collages using the example of the collage “Looking Inward,” which was shortlisted for the HSE competition Parajanov-100 in 2023.

First, I find pictures in magazines that may fit the subject of the future collage. In this case, these were Armenian magazines from the 60s and 70s. I almost never photograph individual images from a magazine, I prefer to immediately find pairs of pictures from different magazines that form a ready-made element of the plot and composition. Sometimes I like one of these pairs so much that I use it separately from the collage, as an independent mini-collage. I make several pairings with the same pictures, and then choose the best one.

Then I post-process the photos as needed for the collage. If necessary, I interfere with the image, violating the “documentary” nature. For example, here I changed the picture of the sick man and the geisha by adding a bouquet of flowers from another picture. In addition, if I don’t find what I need in my image sources, I can use a picture from the Internet - this is how I added a portrait of Osip Mandelstam.

After that, I collect all the photos in one multi-layered file in Photoshop and begin to optimize their placement. Sometimes at this stage I see that I need to reshoot or select some other pictures. It happens that I have to separate a couple of pictures, leaving one or placing them in different parts of the collage.