Magazines

Link To Collage: Magazine Collage Project

I chose to do my collage theme on magazines because I felt that it was something that represented a wide range of different demographics in our society. There are magazines for technophiles, reading groups and even pornography. Not only do magazines represent a wide range of cultural possibilities but most magazines, especially magazine covers tend to be very visual. I thought this visual aspect was something I could easily integrate into a collage, unlike newspapers or other forms of media.

What I felt was most important to my collage was representing the diverse and eclectic mix of magazines we have in this country. There are literally hundreds of magazines I could have chose from, but I decided that my collage would work best if I chose the most recognizable and widely read magazines. What I had to do next was show all of this in a collage.

At first I wanted to do a collage that was a just a still image of different magazine covers mixed up together, but after listening to what other people’s ideas were as well as some advice from our local Tech Fellow I decided to make a movie. I wanted the video to show the diversity of magazines.  One night, while I was watching television I saw an iPad commercial and realized the same concept might work just as well if I replaced the iPad’s apps with magazine covers.

I chose a variety of magazine covers, some more famous than others, that I thought would be a good sample population of the different kinds of magazines that are out there. After finishing the movie I felt like I had only scratched the surface of all different magazine combinations. So, I decided to expand my collage by taking a much larger sample of magazines by taking names of magazines in their original fonts and colors and putting them altogether on a white canvas. After this was completed I had two different collages.

I thought that having two collages might be confusing, so I added my still image collage of al the different magazine names and added it to my movie collage. I did this by adding the opening theme music from 2001: A Space Odyssey and some dramatic camera sweeping. In the end I felt that the combination of the iPad parody and the more traditional collage got my point across in a more thorough and entertaining way than if I only did one or the other.

Magazines have played such an important role in American culture. Television and newspapers usually overshadow them but magazines have impacted us in ways that no other form of media can. For example Time magazine has recorded down the most influential people of all time, while Mad changed the very ideas of humor and popular culture during its prime. The Economist and The New Yorker influence our opinions in ways newspapers cannot. The Rolling Stones set the standard for serious music critique since its foundation. The history of magazines is just as varied as the selection of magazines on store shelves today.

In the end all I really wanted to do was provide people with a view of how varied and diverse magazines can be. From Playboy to The NewYorker, no matter who you are, or where you come from you will probably find a magazine that is right for you