A number of years ago on one of my daily alley junkets I came across an old cardboard box next to a dumpster. It was full of cards of some sort but when I picked one up I discovered that it was an old photograph. As it turned the box was full of photos that someone must have thrown out. They may have come from an old photo studio.
The pictures, themselves, looked as though they were from the early 20th Century. All were black and white and sepia, and the thought of them being tossed into a landfill or destroyed in the rain was too much to bare. So I brought the box home and stashed it on a shelf until I could figure what to do about them. I saw them as time markers that needed to be protected. I thought donating them somewhere.
But over time as I would study them I began to see them differently. I had already begun to cut apart many of my old etchings and drawings and turning them into collages. Why not experiment with these photographs as well? At first I was tentative. They were quite valuable (at least to me) and fragile after all. But the more I cut the more interesting the results. I literally mixed and mashed parts and pieces of photos of people from different periods, genders, and ages together to create entirely new and strange identities.
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