My Collage

I used to like cutting things out of magazines and putting them up on my bulletin board in middle school. It was mostly celebrities that I liked, outfit ideas, products I wanted to get, or anything that looked cool and colorful. However while I was making my collage for my seminar class, I found that I didn't want to cut up my magazines.

I guess my appreciation for photography didn't kick in until after middle school. I didn't want to destroy these works of art. I mean, I consider them art--most people probably consider them annoying advertisements. But when I read a magazine I really look at every single photograph on every single page.

One thing I've always wondered was how much work goes into creating something. An advertisement, a movie, a TV show, a song, everything. I want to know who is involved, what they do, and how they do it. That's part of the reason why I'm a TV-Radio major: I enjoy the production side of things.

That being said, it was somewhat difficult for me to cut the lips out of basically every single person in the two magazines I used (Seventeen and Cosmopolitan). I felt like I was ruining these photographers' and editors' hard work, stealing it and adding it to my own piece. It just made me feel weird.

And so, here it is:

Ta-da!

Here it is up close and personal.

As I made this collage, I thought about a couple of different ways I could interpret it. I didn't have one clear message that I wanted to express as I created it...so here are a few different ones:

1. Making people smile makes me happy. I wanted to portray that with all the smiles. Pretty simple.

2. The importance of communication. What a person says means so much to me, whether it's online, over a text, or in person. I feel like many arguments we (I say "we" as in college students) have start with a communication error.

3. People will talk about you. No matter what, some people will like you, and some people will hate you. And you can either let it be in the foreground of your life (like what you see in my collage) or you can learn to accept it and move on, focusing on other things (like the background of my collage. Which is hard to see, yet it's still there).

You can decide which interpretation you like the best, or create your own.