Friday, January 16, 2026

Collage

A four-frame collage of a woman who is lying on a blanket on a beach. The collage covers only her shoulders, head and arms. Her head is resting on her left hand; she is looking from left to right, and her right arm/hand is extended towards and resting on a drawing pad lying on the blanket. The four pieces of the collage are assembled ditigally, and appear as if they are actual photographic prints lying on top of each other. Her body parts within the collage are not perfectly aligned.
Penny Collage, ©2026 Patrick T. Power

I scanned the negatives for this today. I took the photographs used in this collage in either the summer of 1991 or 1992... leaning towards the latter. They were taken one weekend that Penny and I took the kids to Grand Haven State Park, which runs along the shore of Lake Michigan near Muskegon, Michigan. It's probably the earliest example of my creating not-so-typical "panoramas" with my picture taking. Aside from possibly laying the original prints on top of each other way back then, I'd not thought about creating an actual collage out of them until today.

A five-frame collage of a woman who is lying on a blanket on a beach along with her son. The collage covers only her shoulders, head and arms. Her head is resting on her left hand; the boy's head similarly is resting in his right hand. She is looking from left to right, and her right arm/hand is extended towards and resting on a drawing pad lying on the blanket. The four pieces of the collage are assembled ditigally, and appear as if they are actual photographic prints lying on top of each other. Her body parts within the collage are not perfectly aligned.
Penny Collage II, ©2026 Patrick T. Power

This second version includes our son, Zachary, but he got up while I was taking the series of photographs, so that's why he appears somewhat to be floating mid-air. Penny also moved a bit during the sequence, as she lowered her left arm and rested it across her right arm before raising it back to her chin. I like them both for different reasons.

At that time in my life, I mostly took pictures of the kids, Penny, or documented family gatherings, which, of course, is why I appear in so few of our family's photographs. I wasn't much of a photographer, really, despite that I had a 35mm camera and had photographed a few weddings. At best, I was a picture taker. Which is not to say that I didn't have ideas about being a photographer. (Many a set of negatives has a frame or two in which I attempted something "artsy"... something that caught my eye for one reason or another.)

In fact, it was about this time that I purchased a used medium format camera, a Mamiya RB67, and shortly after that, an auto-focus Nikon N90, along with a couple of lenses. While the N90 was sort of classified as a serious hobbyist or just-short-of-professional camera, the lenses were adequate only in their combined ability to cover a range from 28mm to 300mm: a Nikkor AF 28-85mm f3.5-4.5 and a Nikkor AF 75mm-300mm f/4.5-5.6. Neither lens was very fast so therefore not ideal for doing professional work, but I wasn't as informed as I should have been about camera gear when I bought it all.

While writing this, it occured to me that chances are high that I had the N90 by this time as one of the photographs on the same set of negatives was taken by my daughter, and I suspect that since it's in focus, it was the N90. The Nikkormat FTN I'd had been using since 1979 or so (and which I still have) likely would have been a struggle for her to use with her four- or five-year-old hands since it was manual focus.

Photograph of me and my then-wife, Penny, taken from the back seat of our car. I am on the right turned and smiling at the camera from between the headrests; Penny is on the left, wearing sunglasses, and appears to be looking at me.
From the Back Seat

There's a chance, too, that the photographs were taken with Penny's point-and-shoot camera, but judging from the shallow-ish depth-of-field on several other frames (including those which comprise the collage), it's not likely.

These negatives have been tucked away in boxes for nearly thirty years—so long that while I recognized the images in the collage, the photograph of me and Penny took me completely by surprise. Mainly because I just have no memory of it, but also because there are so few photographs with both me and Penny in them.

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Location: San Francisco, CA, USA

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