Author: David McGlynn

In the early days of working with my composite panoramic collages, it became clear to me that some of these images were meant to be big. Alas, because they were originally created as large contact prints containing anywhere from 35 to 150 (later more) 35MM negatives, only some of the smaller assemblies would even fit into an 8×10 enlarger, which I didn’t have anyway. The solution was to make individual prints and assemble them somehow. In some cases I would dry mount prints onto oversize museum board, then frame the entire thing.

This was useful for corporate art sales and some shows. To make very large versions, I found a source for inexpensive lightweight black metal frames which would hold an individual mounted print of each frame of a collage, which I then assembled in vertical rows using long threaded rods. I had a metal hanging strip fabricated which I’d mount to a wall, upon which the rows would hang. I made a 6’ x 6’ version of ‘Untitled, Highland Lake’ in this manner.

In 1989, I contracted with AT&T’s corporate art department to produce a 9’ x 9’ version of ‘Boat, Cape Cod ‘ in the above manner for permanent installation in the Philip Johnson designed AT&T Headquarters building on Madison Avenue. I never managed to get a picture of it in place, but it hung there for years until SONY purchased the building, and my ‘Boat, Cape Cod’ sailed into the collection of the the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, where it lingers in storage presumably.

In 1996 I was contracted by Corporate art company Randolph Tate to shoot and produce two collages for permanent mural installation in the Newscorp Headquarters on Sixth Avenue. These were collages of NY Jets and NY Rangers stadium games. For these, I evolved more of a ‘frieze’ approach, with the individual frames being printed and box-mounted at different sizes and depths. I have a few images here, but it does amaze me how few images I have of this kind of stuff from the pre-digital era……

In 1998 and again in 1999, I was contracted by ESPN ZONE / Disney to shoot, produce and install two site specific mural installations for the new ESPN ZONE restaurants opening in Baltimore and New York City. I was selected along with many esteemed artists and illustrators including Josh Gosfield and Steve Gerberich by curator/artist Steven Diamond, who managed the projects. For the Baltimore project I took a similar approach to the Newscorp project, this time the subject matter was the Preakness Race, the second jewel of the famed Triple Crown.

For the NYC ZONE, we chose the NYC Marathon as subject matter (after considering a possible NY Yankee ticker tape parade collage). We installed it on the underside of a curling staircase at the front entrance. The final collage, consisting of a couple hundred separate images, was broken out into 12 sections, each printed separately, then mounted onto sheet metal, then cut into their specific esoteric shapes. They were then installed as an overlapping ‘drop ceiling’, which could not have been done without the expertise of lifelong friend and union carpenter Michael Connor, who supervised the installation.

Right up until this assignment I had pretty much steadfastly avoided doing any ‘David Hockney patchwork style’ photo collages. Apart from the fact that it simply wasn’t my thing, I was still sorta smarting from the constant comparisons while doing my own work. (for more info on that moment, please see: https://davidmcglynn.com/2023/04/27/tearsheet-time-capsule-brooklyn-bridge-postcard-1982/) Then… I was selected by esteemed art director Alexander Isley along with a group of fine illustrators to be part of a political homage/parody article wherein we were all asked to do portraits of then president George Bush in different famous artists styles. I was asked to mimic the style of David Hockney. For a few seconds I bristled, then realized this was exactly what I needed to do – to crack thru my self imposed stylistic exile, and because… it actually looked like a fun thing to do.  We came up with an outdoor pool related concept as this was/is a big theme of Hockney’s work. ‘Poolitical Couple’ – George and Barbara Bush poolside was born.

At this point in time I was routinely asking friends and family to step in as models for assignments (cheaper by the cousins!) and this job was no exception. On top of that, we photographed it at my brother Willy’s pool at his home in Putnam Valley NY. As part of the sketch phase, I went up to my parent’s house in the Bronx, and hustled them and my friend Angelo from across the street for some pretty funny tests.

I was very excited about the idea of creating an image with GHWB clipping his toenails, but it didn’t fly. That’s OK, we’d get the last laugh in what was already a pretty hilarious endeavor. I created some comical cut-out prints of George and Barbara’s faces for added realism….. For the final shoot we had my father as GHWB, my cousin Kathleen McGlynn (RIP) as Barbara, and my Brother Willy and brother in-law Joey as ‘secret service’ agents.  I should note at this point the plan for the original art after publication was to present it all to the Bush White House as a gift from Forbes. I was so very on board with that because…. brother William, God bless his departed soul, was a reasonably good marijuana cultivator, and though it was early in the season, we were able to sneak a small plant into the picturenext to olde George.

We were VERY excited at the prospect of having a photograph of a pot plant next to GHWB hanging somewhere IN THE WHITE HOUSE. As it turned out that never happened, but it did hang in the Forbes Gallery on Fifth Avenue for years. On top of being one of the most fun assignment experiences, and one of the funniest collages I’ve ever made, it did open up the floodgates of future patchwork collage making, because, as it turns out, the only one who really cared was me. Let go those self imposed shackles! I probably saved oodles in therapy costs as well.

By the time I received this assignment for American Health Magazine in 1989, I had more or less mastered creating little ‘planetoid’ collages within my composite panoramic style, the first one being ‘Boat, Cape Cod’ which I had photographed in Wellfleet in 1981. Prior to this, I was creating very regimented 180/360 gridded panoramic collages using my special device on a tripod. The boat image, composed of 9 strips of 6-35MM frames each, was done ‘freehand’, wherein I sought to create essentially a fisheye view in sections. The challenge, while shooting so many frames, was keeping track in my head of where I was within the overall design. Working without a plan, I did pretty well, and always enjoyed the imperfections. I made a slew of these planetoid pictures over the years. For this assignment I changed it up by turning the design inside out. On top of that, I worked off of a sketch to ensure the creation of a tight circular form. I was getting paid after all. It was an environmental piece and I sought to make it all about sky.

I photographed it in the fields on the campus of my alma mater, SUNY Purchase College, using olde pal Jerald Frampton as model. As it turns out the boat image wasn’t the first planet shape collage I had ever made.

I found this sketch from a student project on panoramics, a foreshadowing of my future photography endeavors. Over the next few years I returned to this same grassy field to do more collage assignments, including the last two shown here.

As I made the all-important discovery that my gridded panoramic photo collages had genuine limitations for usage on the commercial assignment side of things (magazines, corporate, advertising, etc.) I began devising some styles and approaches based on other photo experiments I was doing. I was always a little squeamish about the vibrant collective warning against ‘selling out’ that was popular amongst the young idealistic arteest set, even if it was a little vague. It took a little while to realize how no one actually gave a shit – it was an adorably constructed phantom value I adhered to, like many. If Picasso managed to find himself doing a painting for the cover of IBM’s Annual Report, I’m sure that painting would still fetch 50 million bucks today. (I suddenly smell a raft of letters to the editor…)  Anyway, I felt better leaving my gridded collage work unscathed over in my fine art production side.  I was moving quickly thru styles at this moment in time, sometimes inviting an art director or photo editor to take a chance on an experimental approach. Those poor fools. I must make amends someday. Yep, sometimes it all worked, sometimes, not so much.  Thankfully I kept my feet moving.  For this Interview Magazine assignment I had the privilege of photographing the emerging house band Kraze, who had the hit song ‘The Party’ playing at those deep-house clubs in the 80s. They were awfully nice, but I could tell they were a little nervous; this is not a photo shoot they were accustomed to, coming out to our strange loft in Astoria Queens, no typical hair, make up, wardrobe, catering, just me and my rickety homemade lighting arrangements and weird music. They had that look of bewilderment, like they were wandering around an airport in a foreign country.  At one point the lead singer just gently leaned in and said. “ please – just make us look good“.  For these photos I was shooting in color film, and doing my special stencil easel treatments under the enlarger, which I have subsequently categorized as ‘Proto – Photoshop’. I do like the way the Interview art director arranged the four individual portraits, thank God, because the group photo was kind of a fail. The joy of flying by the seat of one’s pants.

In the early 80s I attended a performance by Laurie Anderson in the then decrepit plaza of the New York State Pavilion at the site of the old 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing. She stepped up to the microphone gazing around and said “Wow, so this is what the future looks like 25 years later“. Recently I had the opportunity to visit Buckminster Fuller‘s geodesic dome in Woods Hole Massachusetts, abandoned and in utter disarray.

On the property, a new development springing up, the piles of earth pushed towards this now crumbling signifier of a bright and shiny future. So this is what the future looks like 70 years later. The dome was built in 1953, commissioned by a local restauranteur, and was Fuller’s first attempt at building the unique structure he developed. His general vision for geodesic domes was ambitious – he felt certain he could solve building and housing shortages with these domes which needed significantly less materials to build. The Dome Restaurant was regarded as an incongruous eyesore to some in the neighborhood, alas it was a very popular place for those seeking its novelty, and it thrived into the 80’s. As it turned out, it was a leaky affair and a heat trap as well. The future at 30 years…. After decades of neglect, new owners wanted to bulldoze this piece of history to make way for development, but neighborhood outcry secured a deal where they will not only keep but restore the dome. Even so, the plans and the dome’s exact future are not clear as of today.

Back in the early days of working with my composite panoramic photography I envisioned making 3D environmental wraparound panoramic photographs, a precursor to QTVR, the kind of photographic experience you can now do with an app on your phone. I was using Bucky’s domes as direct inspiration. I guess I’ve been a fan for a while; I made a few of Bucky’s ‘Tensegrities’ (tension-integrity) sculptures while in school. Riffing on the dome but eventually settling on a Mercator-projection style solution which was more fitting for how I was creating these panoramics, I made a few mock ups, including a reasonably large one which I did have in a show in the 80’s.

Coincidentally, on that otherwise lovely drive I had been listening to the book ‘Bittersweet – How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole’ by Susan Cain which my sister Tracy recommended. It’s a great book. As part of the author’s journey she talks a lot about the soothing power of melancholic music and lyrics and her absolute favorite artist in this vein is Leonard Cohen. A line from one of my favorite Leonard Cohen songs ‘Last Year’s Man’ popped into my head as I tried to reconcile the sadness of seeing this important monument falling apart, its future uncertain. “All the rain falls down Amen, on the work of last year man” I give my first impulse to save it some credence, “No, not the bulldozers! Something must be done to save this structure, this piece of history!” But why and for how long? I relax and realize it will be OK either way; I’ve learned a thing or two about impermanence over the years. All the same, right now it would be a helluva place to hold your next rave.

Analog Photo Projects Before the Computer Age

For a long time when people would ask me how and why I started making photo collages, I found myself spinning elaborate stories of my ‘dissatisfaction with the static nature of the single image’ and ‘a desire to express a feeling of time and motion, and not simply capturing an instant in time’. This was usually during interviews conducted by magazine editors who needed space-filling words. I could spew with the best of them but in hindsight I believe I was simply signaling my youthful attitude toward the ‘decisive moment’ crowd and the likes of straight, formal photographers such as Ansel Adams, etc. I ran with a snarky art-punk crowd, and I was insufferable. The fact is, right from the outset I was simply using various camera techniques as tools to make artful images, pushing limits of long exposure, motion blur, multi flash, multi exposure, drag shutter etc. and those techniques simply revealed themselves as creative solutions on the fly, and, well, it all pleased me. Collage came naturally on this kind of path. So did this body of work which I now call Proto-Photoshop. So named, because it was all done before art-making was available on computers. After the advent of computer art and Photoshop, people would look back at this work and say: “I guess you made this in Photoshop?” We called it photo-illustration back then. 

In this grouping there are a few collages, drag shutter and long-exposure motion images, but the bulk are essentially multiple image prints made in the darkroom. Most were created for commercial assignments in the 80’s and 90’s. Some are color negative film printed on C-type paper,

others are black & white reversal film printed on Cibachrome paper.

The color shifts were created using the enlarger.  Some are straightforward multiple image prints.

In some cases I made sectioned stencils and exposed each area separately, treating each with its own color and tone, sometimes adding a ‘spin’ to the easel to create motion, sometimes adding a physical stencil like a window screen, broken glass, etc. to create effects.

Some of the exposures took several minutes to execute; I would use a cassette tape of pre-recorded instructions to help in the dark. This in addition to some thorough planning and sketching before the actual shoots. Some of the effects were photographed ahead, some created in the darkroom.

A particularly proud moment was photographing the woman floating in milk by cutting holes for her hands and head out of a large piece of white board, and printing that into the final image.

Whew, today that would take 5 minutes in Photoshop.  It is safe to say when Photoshop came along, I was ready. I didn’t take to it right away, however.  In fact, I worked extensively for WIRED magazine late into the 90’s, even had a spot on the masthead as a contributing artist, and I never did any digital work for them.

In fact, when I did Absolut McGlynn (along with a group of WIRED artists), I did my usual analog print collage. That year I entered it into the Graphis Photography Annual.

I won placement… but in the relatively new Graphis Digital Annual. I had to let them know it was analog art, and they said: “Oh damn. Well, um, can we put in the digital edition anyway??”  I said yes of course, as that strange secret act appealed to my subversive nature.  A few years later I started using Photoshop. 

In early Summer of 1988 I was working in what would be my last restaurant job, at An American Place with James Beard award winner and pioneer of the new American cuisine Larry Forgione. I was extremely lucky to have worked at 2, 3, and 4 star restaurants in NYC during my 80’s waitstaff reign of terror. But I was done. Conde Nast’s Traveler Magazine was putting together photographers for a special London issue and I was in consideration thanks to friend and photo editor Kathleen Klech, who thought, though untested, I could be an interesting part of the mix, which was a group of considerably more experienced and seasoned travel photographers. After all, I was doing these interesting photo collage thingies. I had firmly decided that if I get this job, I’d go full-time freelance and never look back. I can vividly remember calling her from the payphone in the coat room every two hours for what must have been a pretty annoying stretch. When maybe turned yes, I gave notice, and off to London we went. We spent approximately a week there, me wandering about making photo collages during the day, then meeting up with the gang at night at restaurants and bars of London, all in all having a fabulous time. It became abundantly clear this was the more desirable employment scenario. While there I made over a dozen different collages, a handful of 3×3’s, some diptychs, some panoramic strips, etc. Back in NYC, I put together the various projects, and excitedly submitted them, and impatiently waited….. for the issue to come out…. to find that they only used a few frames extracted from one of the collages.

Crestfallen, all I could think of was the Star-Kist tuna commercials of the 70’s – ’Sorry Charlie, Star-Kist don’t want tunas with good taste, Star-Kist wants tunas that taste good’. What was I thinking? What were they thinking?? I really loved some of the images I made while there (some are attached here), alas, travel photography they are not. Having had plenty of photo jobs under my belt by this time, I was already reasonably jaded, so I took it all on the chin. No matter, I was launched. And I never looked back!

Right on the brink of my commitment to working full-time in assignment photography 100%, I contracted this job with Avenue Magazine. I had a few jobs under my belt already where I had applied my fine art photo collage style to commercial ventures. It was not always a comfortable or sensible fit. That is to say, where the solutions would often work, I still felt slightly like a…. sellout? Those feelings would go away upon close inspection whereupon I would discover that absolutely no one cared about this except for myself….  I forget exactly why we chose black and white, but it looks good to me now.  Avenue was then still in print, now it is online. It is a very highbrow lifestyle magazine appealing to the happy healthy affluent elite of NYC, who were absolutely brimming with wealth in the Eighties. What better topic for the magazine than an article about wealthy rare tree collectors living in the East Hamptons. I had a particularly fun time photographing the late Mr. Alfonso Ossorio, heir to the Domino sugar fortune, an artist who owned a wee 60 acre estate in the Creeks in the Hamptons with his partner Ted Dragon, at a time when a single acre would fetch around 9 trillion bucks. He couldn’t have been any more cordial and interesting, showing me not only his collection of trees, but his art and sculptures which were all over the grounds.

I was fortunate enough to visit him again along with olde pal Jerald Frampton, at which time I created a handful of collages, including some new 3X3 format collages I’d been experimenting with, some of which can be seen here. As for the tearsheet, I think I only ever received one copy, and cannibalized it for the portfolio, so only half is visible here. Also here is an example of Mr. Ossorio’s assemblage work (or as he preferred to call them: ‘Congregations’)