Some of my best collages have only two pieces. This one has the man buried in the pile of sand (out of Life magazine) superimposed on a photograph by Sebastião Salgado from his 1996 calendar. It is a superb photograph, conveying an eerie sense of alienation, these folks walking away taking children and furniture. It is also a study in triangles. The mountains, the capes, the hats, even the tufts of grass, are all shaped like triangles pointing upwards. There even was a triangular shaped hole in the foreground, just big enough for the sand man to fit in. With the kid looking backwards, smiling, it completes the sense of the man being left behind, and the rest of the community going who knows where.
Collage Bert Speelpenning, ps, January 1997.
