Introduction | People | Places | Events | Photocollages
I first started using photography seriously when I met the late developer Barry Anderson in Mulfuria. He was utterly unbelievable as a walking, breathing incarnation of everything meant by beauty, truth and youth. His image could not be allowed to perish, and I photographed him constantly. I paintined him many times, but nothing remains except for the memory of what he was then. Before his head was shaved on becoming a miner; before he went into the army; before he played rugby.
All the negatives and prints of him were in the steel trunk destroyed by Bunty while I was in Saudi. I often dream of recreating the painting I did of him and which was left to Sadie in Kent in 1968 when I went to the Middle East for 3 years. An impossible task now. The real person isn’t here. My photography like all photography is a fraction of a second stopped in time.
Of a roll of 36 frames on a pre-digital film, one would be lucky to keep and print a single image. I have never drawn from one of these prints. My photo’s are the finished result. The small section presented on this site are the survivors of the hundreds, if not thousands of prints made. I have turned most of them into collages – a blend of found text and image. All of them have been published in magazines over the years. My photography now, though, is principally a record of all work done. A catalogue.
These photocollages are and amalgumation of text and photographs each of which become greater than the sum of the parts. This is NOT KURT SCHWITTERS speaking about his” merzbau ” or Nino Quottrone pointing a tableknife at my throat and yelling STRONZO or PINNOCHIO(Finnochio ( fennel)in Calabia means bumboy).
In 1966 in my bedsitter in Hampstead Hill Gardens I
first combined photo cutouts with text and printed them in black&white using one of the first copiers…a tiny portable mangle-thing involving liquid. Coloue newspaper magazine supplements were the very latest thing and EVERYBODY was at it then from passepartout dowagers to flower children.
In Northern Nigeria I used the technique when I metamorphosed into the Head of the Graphics(Printing)Department there…using copying cameras to make vacuum-frame black and white negatives which I combined with text and exhibited at the British Council. I did a beautiful poster for the first performance of Wole Soyinka’s play;THE KING’S HORSEMAN and later for the Tuareg version of Julius Caesar which I designed. An example of this is RETURN FROM THE EAST which uses one of Baron von Gloeden’s photos of the head of a Taormina stripling.
In 1995 I created more than a hundred collages using photos I had taken of Scottish men,being careful to keep records of proof of age etc. I combined these with found texts from every concievable source my written by me…or cut from newspapers or periodicals. This fragmented assemblage was used by people such as Max Ernst and is nothing new. My A3 sized picture-poems were my absorbed attempt to be as direct and ‘real’as possible. I later heavily censored most of them(a crime I blush to confess!) While I exhibited five huge poster-sized enlargements of Adam at the ThirdEyeCentre in Glasgow,these collages were never framed nor exhibited though I showed the collection to the TRANSMISSION GALLERY and to an ESPRESSBAR/GALLERY in Park Street,Glasgow. I have been encouraged by the esteemed art Collector BCW that They will at last be shown,framed at the GLC in Dixon Street between 1st and 16th November 2002.
Stewart Laing 