Photo collages on the visual culture of the 1980s

The artistic exploration of a decade combined with the testing of analogue photographic techniques was the focus of a university project by art students at the University of Oldenburg.

Getting to know the 1980s, a decade that the students only know from history books, stories or the media, in all its exciting and contradictory facets, dealing with documents of historical events from politics, media, everyday and popular culture, was the task and starting point of the practical art exercise "Lichtspuren".

The artistic-practical exploration and appropriation of the visual culture of the 1980s, the search for and processing of familiar and less familiar visual material as an impulse for the development of an individual perspective on the past was a prerequisite for the realisation of the photo collages using the historical technique of cyanotype. The initial aim was to follow one's own interests, to approach images and motifs of visual culture, to research their historical background, to search for and select pictorial elements and to combine them using photo collage techniques.

The task was to conceive a pictorial design that made it necessary to work with rather unambiguous, clearly (re-)recognisable pictorial elements, to condense the selection and to insert it into a given mask frame. The partly fading blue colouring of the cyanotype technique combines all the collage elements into a coherent tableau and emphasises the historicity of the decade through the alienating aesthetic.

The open play with form and content, with signs and meanings as essential mediating instances, was intended to combine to form a subjective-interpretative view of a historical decade, a view of the past from the present. The students' temporal and emotional distance from the events of the 1980s, their unbiased, spontaneous and sometimes irreverent and ironic approach to the source material led to completely new and surprising visual statements, to new contexts of meaning, whose exciting gaps need to be filled by the viewer.

Work steps:

• Research in books, family albums, on the Internet for images from the 80s:
  e.g. in politics, pop music e.g. in politics, pop music, fashion, art, film, TV, design, technology, etc.
• Select, edit and print several templates
• Create foil copies (A4) of the image elements in the negative
• Cut out, rearrange and combine the image material in the given mask frame to create a coherent statement
• Transferring the collage to the cyanotype technique

Students: Annika Christoph, Mayra Ege, Celine Haferkamp, Katrin Hanenkamp, Katrin Helms, Merle Körte, Sabrina Mudrak, Janine Oldiges, Kimberly Schmidt, Fabienne Schünemann, Mareike Tanzen

Supervision: Sabine Wallach, University of Oldenburg, Art and Media
Contact: sabine.wallach@uni-oldenburg.de