Discussion
*Social media needs (dumpster) fire exits*
This one's actually from 2024, but I did it after last year's roundup, and I like it well enough to include it in this year's. I think the smoke came out pretty good!
https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/#graceful-failure-modes
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@pluralistic I spent a very enjoyable half an hour scrolling through this thread & want to thank you Cory for the many, many half hours you evidently spent putting all those tremendous collages together 🙇♂️
And thanks too for the excellent tips & hints on sources for hi-res public domain or suitably CC’d imagery – something I’m always on the lookout for 👍
@pluralistic once you make collage part of your creative life, you can't quit. I have more than 15 years doing collage, and it has been part of my open culture advocacy all these years. Glad to find another collagist at heart 🥰
@pluralistic lol, I was just wondering with my partner how you managed to do all your collages right before stumbling upon this thread. Feels supernatural.
Thanks for sharing!
When Boing Boing started including images with our posts in the early 2000s, I hated it. It was such a chore to find images that were open licensed or public domain, and so many of the subjects I wrote about are abstract and complex and hard to illustrate. Sometimes, I'd come up with a crude visual gag and collage together a few freely usable images as best as I could and call it a day.
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But over the five years that I've been writing Pluralistic, I've found myself putting more and more effort and thought into these header images. Without realizing it, I put more and more time into mastering The GIMP (a free/open Photoshop alternative), watching tutorial videos and just noodling from time to time. I also discovered many unsuspected sources of public domain work, such as the Library of Congress, whose search engine sucks, but whose collection is *astounding*.
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(Tip: use Kagi or Google to search for images with the "site:loc.gov" flag).
I also discovered the Met's incredible collection:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search
And the archives of H Armstrong Roberts, an incredibly prolific stock photographer whose whole corpus is in the public domain. You can download more than 14,000 of his images from the Internet Archive (I certainly did!):
https://archive.org/details/h-armstrong-roberts
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Speaking of the Archive and search engine hacks, I've also developed a method for finding hi-rez images that are otherwise very hard to get. Often, an image search will turn up public domain results on commercial stock sites like Getty. If I can't find public domain versions elsewhere (e.g. by using Tineye reverse-image search), I look for Getty's metadata about the image's source (that is, which book or collection it came from).
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Then I search the Internet Archive and other public domain repositories for high-rez PDF scans of the original work, and pull the images out of there. Many of my demons come from *Compendium rarissimum totius Artis Magicae sistematisatae per celeberrimos Artis hujus Magistros*, an 18th century updating of a 11th century demonolgy text, which you can get as a hi-rez at the Wellcome Trust:
https://wellcomecollection.org/works/cvnpwy8d
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Five years into my serious collage phase, I find myself increasingly pleased with the work I'm producing. I actually self-published a little book of my favorites this year (*Canny Valley*), which Bruce Sterling provided an intro for and which the legendary book designed John Berry laid out fot me, and I'm planning future volumes:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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