For her new book ObjectImage, Sarah Tulloch has cut and collaged a collection of black-and-white photographs she inherited from her grandfather.

While British artist Sarah Tulloch was completing her undergraduate degree in fine art, she inherited a collection of photographs from her grandfather, an amateur photographer whom she hadn’t known very well because he lived in Australia and she in the United Kingdom. The collection included both photographs and slides, and it became the catalyst for Tulloch’s extensive photomontage practice.

Sarah Tulloch: ObjectImage, published by Daylight Books, is a poignant approach to the physical material of a photograph and a re-imagination of it into new forms.

Your first series Faultline and Cut Series were made with family images, then you introduced postcards and later, newspapers. How was that process, moving from personal to public material?

While the portrait as a photographic form most often attempts to capture the subjectivity of an individual, many of Sarah Tulloch’s collages in Object Image take the impersonal and vague elements of an image as their object, leaving the subject to struggle for visibility behind them. In Tulloch’s Rembrandt five fingers reach out between photographic shards, as if part of a body trying to crawl into exposure, as if trying to be seen amidst ubiquitous din. This small image of a hand is bisected and buried beneath the collage’s other fragments. It is the narrow eye of a compositional spiral, either the origin or end to its illusory motion.

ObjectImage introduces British artist Sarah Tulloch’s idiosyncratic approach to working with the photographic image. Tulloch uses photo collections left by her grandfather and daily newspaper imagery to explore themes that reflect on our shared habits of consuming photographic media. From the social history of documenting family to the juxtaposition of recycled media imagery she probes and questions both object and image to create new and beguiling works.