Magazine Collages

I love magazines. I love their glossy feel, their magazine-y smell, and the sound of the pages flopping gently together. I love the collective, pieced-together nature of magazines. I love their sectioned layouts and dash borders and opinion pieces. I also love to destroy them.

There are so many magazines. I love cute and creative magazines like Oh Comely and the kid's quarterly publication Anorak, and I'm fond of all the fashion, teen, and games mags that remind me of my youth (maybe I spent too much time doing flow chart quizzes in Mizz), and as a kid I loved the weird insight into adult lives The Observer Magazine had to offer. Actually, a subscription to any of these would be a perfect present. Even my first post on this blog proclaimed my love for magazines. I probably wouldn't actually fight a commuter for a copy of Evening Standard Magazine, but I would think about it, for a bit.

Magazines are amazing catalogues of images and text - a collagist's treasure trove just waiting to be torn apart and cut into neat shapes. I know that rooting through magazines can lead me to any sort of weird collection of pictures, and looking through old magazines is also a fun way to give yourself a very slight and eerie bout of time-specific culture shock as you remember the sheer prevalence of text codes for clunky pixel wallpapers that were available for your Nokia 3310 and shudder.

It's interesting to take images away from the context of their magazine of origin, then. So they no longer really illustrate anything but themselves, or the new landscape they're part of. But perhaps they retain some of their context, visually. Maybe in the future it will be obvious that these images came from this time.

They are fun little spreads though. Slightly abstract by nature of their removal from context, but so clearly illustrative that they look smart and purposeful alone.