ARTISTS HAVE LONG SOUGHT INSPIRATION IN FOUND PHOTOS. WE CONSIDER THE ETHICAL AND AESTHETIC IMPLICATIONS OF COLLAGE IN AN AGE OF VISUAL ABUNDANCE.
On an unspecified date in the 1960s, a young woman posed for a pin-up shot. Little did she know that decades later she would make an appearance in an artwork by Swedish artist Eva Stenram (b. 1976). If she were to see the image today, she might not even recognise herself. Only the legs are shown, one foot raised up, the other from the knee down, behind a white blind. In the original, the woman’s body features in full amidst the soft furnishings of a domestic interior. In the new version, Stenram has switched foreground and background, digitally extending the blind to obscure most of the figure – shifting the meaning entirely. It wasn’t a camera but the discovery of Photoshop in the late 1990s that sparked Stenram’s interests in photography. “I was fascinated by the ease at which I could mix different pictures together, causing folds in both space and time” she recalls.
