John Sagan
Taking photographs has been a long time love of mine. These photographs were taken in early May 1970 into about the summer of 1971. They were all taken with a 1969 Nikon F. The negatives were made by Mays Photo at that time and were digitized by Jim Risser in 2014. Jim chose the photographs from about 360 in my archive. My relationship to my earlier life and my sense of what I thought should make a good photograph then and now has been an excellent journey and I want to share this with others.
About 3 or 4 years a go, my buddy Gabe brought me a garbage bag of Sunday comics from The Minneapolis Tribune from the year 1936. Gabe had these comics in his shed for the last 30 years, ever since a remodel job in North Minneapolis. When he brought them in, my first thought was ‘collage’ and then did nothing until November of 2015. I kept thinking about those comics as they sat around the shop and I kept moving the bag around. Finally, I got started when I was telling my daughter-in-law about my idea and she asked me to make one for my Grandson’s room. Since most of the comics were brittle, bent and torn in whole or in part, it made sense to save what I could. I separated (tore out) all of the people (children, men and women), landscape elements, buildings; interior and exterior, animals, vehicles and a few word balloons. Occasionally I used scissors but my idea was not precision but to make a new ‘narrative’. This helped me to make new ‘narratives’ based on how the individual pieces felt and/ or looked like in juxtaposition, color and in any dynamic that presented itself. This led to some themed pieces e.g.; ‘Cops and Robbers’ or ‘Homage to Harrison’. It has been a load of fun making these and I have to thank all those Artists whose inspiration was comics and collage and all those friends and family who encouraged me to go ahead.
Those photos take me back to more optimistic times…when as it seems, people had more hair…hair hair beautiful hair !!!