In the previous Blog I mentioned the PageMaker experiments to present the images and the newsletter went a bit deeper into the backgrounds of that. In this Blog I would like to talk about collages, graphic novels and the photo novelle that are all connected to the form of Virtual Journeys and how they influenced.

What is a collage anyway?

A collage is an artistic composition created by assembling and gluing various materials like paper, cloth, photographs, newspaper clippings, fabric, or found objects—onto a flat surface as paper or canvas. The history of collages in art goes back many decades making its appearance early 20th century. Here we are literally talking about artworks glued together. From the French coller, “to glue” or “to stick together”. Georges Braque is one of the earlier examples of this.

Collages in the modern world.

In modern day we digitally glue images together with computers and I would still call this a collage. Although some might argue that its more a montage as all sources are digital and they are mounted together in a composition rather than different materials. In both cases however, the glue version and the digital version, the end result in almost all cases is a ‘whole’. One thing where all parts are combined together into one bigger artwork.

What is a Graphic novel?

As a teen I was interested in graphic novels and collected quite a few over the years. A graphic novel is a book-length work of sequential art that combines text and illustrations to tell a complete narrative, often resembling a traditional novel in length, structure, and character development. An important difference with comics is the artistic detail of the images. Some forms may consist of only images or illustrations.

The Photo Novelle, a middle ground.

As I was growing up in the 70-ies and 80-ies there was a new type of publication becoming popular. The photo novelle, a form of sequential storytelling that uses a series of photographs, often staged images of real people instead of illustrations to tell the story. These photographs are arranged in a sequence, much like a comic book or graphic novel. The images are typically accompanied by dialogue balloons, captions, or text boxes to convey speech and narration. Photography artists as Marie-Françoise Plissart used this form to create art.

The Virtual Journey travel log.

All these forms of images based story telling influenced me to create the Virtual Journeys as they are now. A photo based graphic novel style travel-log. Telling stories of the people in metropolitan settings.