Files for storage of scanning book pictures, used to re-stock the scanning book.

“The idea of an immense photographic archive was at first rejected because it posed such huge difficulties of classification: how could discrete elements be isolated in the continuum of images?”

—C. Ginzburg
“Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” 1983

“The photograph is a thin slice of space as well as time.”

—Susan Sontag
On Photography, 1977

“The alternative use of photographs which already exist cleads us back once more to the phenomenon and faculty of memory. The aim must be to construct a context for a photograph, to construct it with words, to construct it with other photographs, to construct it by its place in an ongoing text of photographs and images. How? Normally photographs are used in a very unilinear way — they are used to illustrate an argument, or to demonstate a thought which goes like this:

Very frequently also they are used tautologically so that the photograph merely repeats what is being said in words. Memory is not unilinear at all. Memory works radially, that is to say with an enormous number of associations all leading to the same event. The diagram is like this:

If we want to put a photograph back into the context of experience, social experience, social memory, we have to respect the laws of memory. We have to situate the printed photograph so that it acquires something of the surprising conclusiveness of that which was and is…

But any photograph may become such a ‘Now’ if an adequate context is created dor it. In general the better the photograph, the fuller the context which can be created.

Such a context replaces the photograph in time — not its own original time for that is impossible — but in narated time. Narrated time becomes historic time when it is assumed by social memory and social action. The constructed narrated time needs to respect the process of memory which it hopes to stimulate.
There is never a single approach to something remembered. The remembered is not like a terminus at the end of a line. Numerous apporaches or stimuli converge upon it and lead to it. Words, comparisons, signs need to create a context for a printed photograph in a comparable way; that is to say, they must mark and leave open diverse approaches. A radial system has to be constructed around the photograpah… ”

—John Berger
“Uses of Photography, (for Susan Sontag)” 1977

In the midst of collage-making, when formative processes are most fully engaged, the maker experiences a meditative stillness, as if the non-discursive, synchronic moment of language (langue) had itself been directly felt. This uniquely expressive yet quiet center becomes all the more significant for having been established precisely at the hurricane’s vortex, where the collectivized debris of image-clutter can at last be idiosyncratically sedimented and laid to rest.

The method’s material substance points, finally, beyond itself to the fact that the elusive yet therapeutically all-important processes that go under the name of “internalization” — the creative moments that establish new inner form — may be approached as a far less subjective ensemble of events than is generally supposed. In the Collage Method the conventional approach to psychotherapy is, in this sense, turned inside out. What are, in a conventional therapeutic setting, the most inscrutably “inner” psychic sequences of signification are, through the actions elicited by the Collage Method, externalized and displayed. The mysterious boundary-shifting moment whereby language permits the expression of an utterly personal content via an utterly impersonal, collective medium is here metaphorically enacted in an image-process. This process is, in turn, able to display linguistic mechanisms (including those essential to the action of internalization) that are, ironically, difficult to to render in verbalized discourse itself. The therapeutic implications that derive from this externalizing inversion are, then, the method’s ultimate justification.