Trying to carve out his own path as a photographer while paying his way through college with commercial assignments, Joe Rudko hit a dead end.
“I felt like I wasn’t really saying anything new with my own images,” he says.
He began to turn to photographs made by others: snapshots found at an antique shop in Washington State that captured fleeting moments of 20th-century American life. Using scissors and glue, Rudko has since worked for over a decade with found photographs to create collages, such as Double Image, that explore color, memory, and the nature of the photographic medium itself.
Double Image was recently on view at the Getty Center as part of the series In Dialogue, which presents contemporary photographs alongside historical works. Rudko’s piece was shown as part of a selection of collages by eight international artists spanning the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Together, the works invited viewers to explore how artists breathe new life into existing images by reframing them for contemporary purposes.
Rudko recently shared how he came to make Double Image, his approach to collage, and his thoughts on abstraction and photography.
Joe Rudko
At college, I came across snapshots at a little antique shop. I became really interested in a lot of the unknowns about these pictures. There was this big shift in thinking, where I was like: “Why am I not using pictures that already exist and changing them? Why don’t I do that instead of trying to add to this never-ending pile of photographs on the Internet?”
It felt like a form of recycling. I have this desire to try to use each little fragment. Maybe it’s just the age I am, growing up in the Pacific Northwest. There was such an importance around reducing, reusing, recycling; there’s a whole song that goes along with that. I found it to be a freeing process, to put stuff bound for the bin to new use.
I started to come across a particular type of photograph called the bonus image, which I think was a promotional sort of thing. When you went to get your prints back from the lab, they had this insert that showed you the normal size of your image, but if you wanted to pay extra next time, you could get a larger size. They’re not super common, but you’ll see two of the exact same image reproduced on the same print, one big and one small. They’re connected with a little perforated edge.
I was really attracted to this formatting difference. A lot of my work comes from a place of being trained as a photographer, and how you present different ways of seeing and how lenses and size distort things. The images are almost identical, but they’re just scaled up or scaled down.
Making my work is like engineering a puzzle. For Double Image, I cut 16 bonus images into half-inch squares. It’s just half-inch, because that’s the standard cutting size for a self-healing board. It’s also the size of my fingertips, so I can move them around very easily. It became a standard size, like a pixel.
In a way, it’s about efficiency, being able to look at a grouping of 16 of these double images all at the same time. I think going through Instagram, sometimes you’re like: “I just looked at 200 images. Wouldn’t it be great if I could just look at one image that mapped them all out?”
For me, it was a way to layer together all of these pictures almost like a cubist painting. I definitely feel like I’m making paintings with photographs, in a way. Or assemblages. They’re found objects, reassembled in this new way. They’re a lot like subway tiles, mosaics, or like you’re tiling the bathroom floor.
I didn’t have any real tangible association with where the pictures came from, who took them, what year, and what the situation was really like. These pictures have left their original source, and their meaning has changed, and it’s a little bit up for grabs.
Breaking apart the pictures was a way of showing that their meaning could be anything, that they were these open objects. When you look at them, you’re invited to be reminded of your own history, rather than someone else’s very specific history. They become little mirrors.
I like that there’s this larger thing that’s made up of all these little different things. Maybe that’s what keeps me going back to collage: having all these disparate stories and histories fitting together in this logical way. Making something simple out of something that can seem very chaotic and disjointed at times.
Abstraction provides an opportunity to see photographs differently. They have this illusion of representation, and people often stop at that. You look at a picture and say, “That’s a tree.” You don’t even say, “That’s a picture of a tree.” It goes right through that. I think introducing abstraction to it is just like, what the hell’s going on here?
Something else can emerge when you look at a photograph as a material object, or just a pure color, or a texture, or a historical artifact, or a shard, or a piece of trash. By cutting up something that already exists, you’re opening it up to new interpretations.
With just about every work that I make, I’m embracing what I don’t know about the pictures as much as what I think I might know. Almost more itself. Embracing that you don’t know anything is a pretty liberating place to be.
