If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
As I go into my fifth year of writing Pluralistic (!), I find myself increasingly reflecting on the unexpected pleasures of creating the collages that head each post. I am by no means a visual artist – my drawing skills are sub-stick-figure, and my spatial sense overall is remarkable terrible. I can’t solve jigsaws, I get lost in hotel corridors, and I can’t find things that are
right under my nose.
But addressing the challenge of illustrating
extremely abstract ideas related to tech policy, corruption, monopoly and other hard-to-visualize ideas has awakened some kind of latent, heretofore unsuspected interest in visual communications in me. Relying exclusively on Creative Commons, public domain, and extremely solid fair use claims in selecting my source materials adds a spicy challenge that makes the whole thing even more engrossing.
I’ve written about my process in finding and preparing these sources before. Here’s 2023’s notes and highlights:
This year saw some new, exciting discovering and challenges. First and foremost is my switch to kagi.com as my preferred search-engine, which is like having access to a time machine that’s connected to pre-enshittificated Google:
Kagi’s image search is
amazing, far better than Google’s, and it has great copyright-based filters. When combined with tineye.com (for finding high-rez versions of images that might not be correctly tagged for rights status), it’s even better. Even so, often Kagi will surface thumbnails of images Tineye can only find as high-rez on proprietary stock art sites like Alamy, covered in gross watermarks. These images are still in the public domain, watermarks or no, but erasing the watermarks is a
lot of work. However, Alamy is a pretty good source of bibliographic information about the original sources of these images, for example, which issue of a 19th century boxing magazine they came out of, and then Kagi can find me high-rez scans of these sources, at the Internet Archive and/or the Library of Congress. I snag those PDFs and import them into the GIMP (which I use for editing) and pull, clean and crop a new high-rez version of those images for my own use. This year, I got much better at saving and organizing all that work on my laptop, but next year I’m hoping to get into a rhythm of uploading my high-rezzes to Wikimedia Commons so everyone can use ‘em.
Getting better at collaging isn’t merely getting better at using search tools, of course. Knowing
what to search for is even more important, especially given the constraints of only using public domain/CC sources. The Library of Congress is a wellspring of visual material, but its own search tool is sadly lacking; however, Kagi’s image search comes to the rescue again, thanks to the “site:loc.gov” flag, which restricts results to the LoC.
It was through these searches that I realized how many of the source images I was pulling down were the work of Joseph Keller (1872-1956), an American political cartoonist who worked extensively for
Punch:
Keppler was called upon to illustrate many, many political issues that have parallels with the modern competition, corruption and geopolitical stories. A scant few of these remain in the periphery of the public’s imagination today, most notably “The Bosses of the Senate,” quite possibly the most significant antitrust cartoon of all time:
But Keppler is a
wellspring of great public domain images, and I’ve been drawing on them heavily. It gives me great pleasure to do so, not just because they’re so well-suited to the stories I write, but also because his posterity deserves it. He should be in the American illustrator pantheon alongside the likes of Norman Rockwell!
Besides my search engine and my sources, 2024 saw one other
gigantic change in my collage-making: I had cataracts removed from both my eyes in September, and my ophthalmologist implanted lenses that corrected my severe astigmatism and permanently focused one of my eyes at 23" and the other at 25’ (this is called monovision). My new eyeballs are still bedding in, and there are days when my vision is severely subpar, but I’m experiencing continuous improvement, and I think this will be a game-changer for 2025.
2025 will also see the long-awaited Version 3.0 release of The GIMP, the free/open image editor I exclusively use. GIMP (Generic Image Manipulation Program) was first released a quarter-century ago, and it’s been in version 2.x for
twenty years, so this is a big milestone. I can’t wait!
Well, enough forematter. Let’s get into this year’s best illustrations. If you want high-rezzes of these (or any of my other collages), you can get them at full rez from my Flickr gallery of Pluralistic collages:
Someday, we’ll all take comfort in the internet’s “dark corners”
This one combines three sources: a public domain image of the Las Vegas sign, a CC 0 image of a western ghost-town, and a fair use gank of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse avatar. I spent a lot of time hand-cropping the blades of grass around the sign’s footing to create the illusion that it was planted in the ground. I’m also pretty happy with the dirt effect I managed on the sign.
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