ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at artworks by artists who are working under the umbrella of constructed photography. Before exploring their work, it is useful to consider how they have been inspired and informed by earlier photographic languages that evolved around the idea of building images and building spaces. Building an image is a performative gesture, a space for creating matter from matter, branching out into a void. Turning to the use of fragments as a device for building images, works by Basim Magdy, Steve Sabella, John Stezaker and Ulla Jokisalo offer diverse examples of methodology, form and content. Fragmentation and its offspring of collage are methods of photographic manipulation that are as old as the medium itself. The artist, who refers to herself as a photographic archaeologist, collects erotic and pornographic images of pin-up girls from magazines, prints, negatives and slides of the 1950s and 1960s.
