"...There Is Still Poetry" collages

There Is Still Poetry

Photographic Collages | 2018 | Robert Mann Gallery, NY

There Is Still Poetry is a body of photographic collage works that investigates the ethical, cultural, and ecological implications of image-making. Each piece in the series reflects on photography as both a material practice and a site of contradiction—where memory, storytelling, militarization, and environmental cost intersect.

In an age when over 1.7 trillion photographs are taken each year, Mattingly turns toward intentionality. Her collages are composed of layered images: about supply chains, digital waste, invisibility, and reverence. These works function as poetic meditations on seeing and not seeing—on what photographs reveal, what they conceal, and the systems they’re embedded within.

Project Details

• Years: 2023–Ongoing
• Medium: Digital and physical photographic collages
• Materials: Pigment prints, archival paper, transparency layers, mixed media
• Exhibited at: Robert Mann Gallery, NY
• Themes: Image ethics, material entanglement, digital excess, storytelling, contradiction

“Photography connects me to my own ethical contradictions, and they are invisible at first. I think about the toxic legacies of the materials involved, the extractive supply chains, the health and environmental costs I may not see but live within. And yet, it’s also memory, culture, story. In the studio, I try to hold both truths. Every image becomes a negotiation between reverence and responsibility. In a world saturated with pictures, how can each photograph still carry weight? There Is Still Poetry is a personal reminder to look carefully.” —Mary Mattingly

Description

Each collage in There Is Still Poetry layers photographs taken across different geographies and timeframes—scenes of environmental transformation, interior objects, landscape fragments, and archival textures. Through digital and physical manipulation, Mary Mattingly creates depth within the surface: glitched strata, poetic ruptures, and impossible spatial joins. These images resist seamlessness, presenting reality instead as stitched and unresolved, echoing the complex, often contradictory layers that form both ecosystems and histories. The series grapples with the material ethics of photography, from the rare earth metals in cameras to the carbon footprint of digital storage, questioning what it means to make and keep images in a culture of oversaturation. Referencing photography’s militarized origins, the work also asks what it means to reclaim the medium for care, resistance, and other ways of seeing.

Selected Works