From 40 Heads by Jorge Chamorro
There are many collage artists that love to work with old photos, which follows a trend with vintage material and aesthetics in collage in general. I can work with a photo from the 1940’s but also with a newspaper from yesterday. In fact, I don’t usually work with very old material.
99% of my collage work is analog (traditional cut and paste), but on a few occasions I make digital collage. Many analog collage artists, specially those who love vintage material, don’t like digital collage - some of them even “think badly” of digital artists. On the other hand, digital collage use to be very “postmodernist” with lot of colour, complex compositions, and many elements and textures.
For this occasion, I found it interesting to work digitally with a simple tool in Photoshop, the Clone Stamp, using very old photos and making digital interventions, removing instead of adding, “decollaging” instead of “collaging.” To hide faces, to cut heads, is like the ABC of collage, maybe the first instinctive intervention in a portrait and something made a million times in collage since its early beginning. It is a cliché, a stereotype, a typical resource in collage. And I like very much to work with clichés. I like to do what has been done a million times in collage, but I try to give it a twist, so it becomes something new to me, at least. And what I present here goes in this direction.
I cut or “decollaged" 40 heads from 28 photos. These are six works from that series of 28. The photos are scanned from the book “Werner von Siemens,” by Bodo von Dewitz, published by Thomas Helms Verlgag in 2016.
Jorge Chamorro (Madrid, 1972) is an independent graphic designer, collage artist and teacher. He loves all three things equally and for all of them he believes in simple, direct and clear communication. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Audiovisual Communication in 1995, and then worked as a graphic designer for ten years in studios and agencies.
In 2005 he started to work independently. He discovered collage in 2006 and it has since become an irreplaceable art form for him. Since 2010 he has taught graphic design and collage. He lives and works in Berlin and Madrid.
Instagram: @_jorgechamorro