Collage
The Lagunilla flea market in Mexico City has, for reasons nobody can fully explain to me, enormous quantities of Spanish-language LIFE magazines from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. I go there every couple of weeks and buy a stack. The ads alone are worth it: full-page illustrated spreads for cigarettes and kitchen appliances, shot and art-directed with a seriousness that no one would spend on those things today and an educational tone that, looking back, just sounds ridiculous. The photographs have a grainy warmth, and the typography is beautifully ornate.
I’ve been making collages from these for a few years now. I flip through the magazines until something catches my eye, and then start combining things across decades and contexts: a mid-century ad next to a war photograph, a smiling housewife next to something she probably shouldn’t be smiling about. Often, I spend as much time reading the articles as cutting them up. A 60-year-old feature on families struggling with ties that reach across the US-Mexico border reads differently when you’ve just listened to a podcast on the Border Wall.
I cut out words and captions from the ads and headlines and layer them in to heighten whatever is going on or turn it into something weirder. What I like about collage is that the material pushes back. You have to work with what the magazine gives you, and half the time, the interesting stuff comes from being stuck with an image or a word that doesn’t quite fit perfectly.
Once image generation models got good enough in 2025, I set up a custom Gem in Google’s Gemini using NanoBanana, trained it on photos of my own physical collages, and started feeding it iPhone photos as input. The model’s looseness with prompts turned out to be a feature rather than a bug: it doesn’t do exactly what you ask, it goes somewhere nearby. That’s usually where the interesting stuff comes from in collage, anyway.
The analog work is still what I’d rather be doing on a Saturday afternoon, but the model has become an interesting creative complement. It’s almost a portable, social version of my usually stationary, solitary hobby. I love taking photos of friends and placing them in absurd juxtapositions, making them the centerpiece rather than a random stranger from the 1950s.
