The Ellsworth Variations by antyphayes, 2023.

I call these the ‘Ellsworth Variations’ after the original photo taken during a polar expedition led by Lincoln Ellsworth in 1935/36. The physical reproduction I used for the collages is from the July 1936 issue of National Geographic.

These variations were made by cutting out the facial features of the original, leaving the sunglasses intact, though altered (to make them appear more “cartoony”). I used this template on various images taken from magazines and comics. I also used masking tape to secure the template to the image that came to fill the facial void. These formed the basis of a series of high res scans. In total I made some 80 variants of the original photos. The ones reproduced above are, in my opinion, among the best of these. Nonetheless, I finally settled upon one of these variants to glue down. The very first of the one’s reproduced above.

I spent several hours of one day making these variants. Though I was at first taken by the idea of making so many variants of this collage “base”, I came to feel that the method by which I made them and then scanned them approximated a production line, with all the pejorative sense that this entails. Art as churn, as mass production, another guise for our shared alienation from any meaningful control over the means of production of life and space. Or not, as is also the case. The ambivalence of alienation and “dis-alienation”.

This has been another Collage Tuesday post.