Beautiful new photographic collages provide “a way of understanding people, and myself”

It’s not easy meeting people in a big city like London, but artist and photographer Anthony Gerace found an innovative solution that played to his strengths: making portraits of people. He’d previously been living in Toronto, where it was easy to find friends or friends of friends to pose for his images, shot on a medium format camera and developed by hand. But London was different. “Everyone’s always so busy in London, the pace is so fast,” he says.

A new project draws together the faces that Anthony’s met over the past five years from both cities, and reinvigorates them with meticulously constructed squares of collage. The shards of colour are taken from vintage magazines, mostly published from 1920 until the 1960s. The little scraps create new narratives within each image, and means they can be read in multiple ways. “A few of them have little in-jokes, like someone’s name on a tiny scrap of typography,” says Anthony.

The artist has called the series The Ruined Map – a nod to their psycho-geographical origins. “I began photographing people as a way to understand them and to understand myself; to learn about and meet new friends through portraiture,” Anthony explains.

“When I moved to England, I was removed from the context that those images—images that I came to cherish for the camaraderie they engendered—created, and was left with a sense of loss for people I’d known so fleetingly. The Ruined Map is a response to this loss, and is a reapproach to what I find so intriguing about collage: its ability to comment on the loss of identity and meaning through the act of physical destruction, an act that leaves instead an ache for something no longer comprehensible. By destroying these images, I have completed them.”