I really liked Dan Phillips’ talk. He had a lot to say, and I found it easy to agree with him. I also found it fascinating the way that he was able to recycle used home items to make something new and unique. This is similar to the art of collage, and the question of how harmony is created in an image.
In the way that Dan Phillips talked about repetition and patterns when he reuses materials in his homebuilding, photo collages use repetition and patterns to create new images themselves. In Phillips’ homebuilding, he often takes an object’s design and repeats it throughout the house (this is especially true for his Budweiser house). In photo collages, a single image can be ripped or cut into parts, and these parts can be reused as a whole in the new image, but in a different pattern than before, thus creating something new from something old.
Dan Phillips also discusses an interesting point that people act differently when they are alone than they are when they are surrounded by other people. In a way, photographs can be like this. A single photograph has a different effect than a collection of photographs. Furthermore, a piece of a photograph in a collage has a different effect than a whole, untorn photograph. Thus, the purpose of placement in a collage is almost always different than the purpose of a photo that is left alone. Both have their strong points and weaknesses, but they serve completely different purposes. I think this concept is one of the most interesting ones about artistic principles. There are certain expectations for photographs, and there are certain, different expectations for collages. And the purpose of these things, and the process of creation that leads to the final product, is the harmony created as a product of these expectations and the artists’ interpretations of those expectations.