As a first-year photo student at RIT, I was given an assignment to create photograms from magazine pages – an exercise in both visual creativity and darkroom skills. The resulting prints were black and white negatives prints, montages of the front and back of a single printed page.

Having put aside several magazines in recent years in hopes of working on a digital iteration of that project, I recently made selections and set up a copy stand over my 4-foot light table. My new images are edited to mimic those black and white prints, with the look and feel of real photograms in mind.

My working title was chosen because this concept has direct descendancy from that early photogram assignment, and because of the obvious fact that my images are derived from the photographers, graphic designers, and typographers whose work is primary on the pages of any magazine.

Aesthetically, my interest is the same as my Leaf Print projects (both film and digital) and other early school projects: transparency, the positive/negative relationship, visual iconography, and graphic design. Further, magazine pages provide the opportunity to explore serendipitous montages, reversed type (now simple design elements), and portraits, which become abstract in the sense that identities are now almost unrecognizable.

Paul Rogers, May, 2016