Cooking up a Collage: Interview with Marisa Bazan

Marisa Bazan, Wait, They Don't Love Me Like I Love Me, Analog paper collage, 6.5x4.5 inches.

By GRACE PALMER March 26, 2025

3,000 miles away in her New York flat, Marisa Bazan sat down to chat with me about her work. Dreary weather, at least in my corner of the world, would inspire a melancholic mood were it not for Bazan’s vibrant work and personality. Encountering her photography in NME’s recent retrospective on the musician Saya Gray, I was quickly introduced to the world of Marisa Bazan. Bold, unapologetically colourful portraits flood her website’s homepage (marisabazan.com) – vivacious characters, full of life. Step further into her world and you’ll find yourself amidst the humorous, satirical (if not grotesque) collages. Kitchen stoves on fire, an agentic female nude, and young girls consuming snakes all encompass Marisa Bazan’s phantasmagorical realm (and a 1920s housewife’s living nightmare). In one arresting image, Wait, They Don’t Love Me Like I Love Me, your typical ‘porno-mag' nude appears ensnared by femme-fatale claws. Her collage traverses that line between the erotic and the unnerving. Capturing the vagina dentata, the sado-masochism of a milk carton, or the orgiastic floral eruption, Marisa Bazan’s work is refreshing, exciting, and (potentially) revolutionary. I spoke with Bazan about all the steps involved in creating these pieces, her investigations into the female body, and the intriguing ventures on her horizon. 

Palmer: I am excited to speak with you today, especially after discovering your work in NME’s photoshoot featuring Saya Gray. How did you begin photographing musicians, as they appear to be a recurring subject in your photography? Is that the direction the art industry has taken you? 

Bazan: It initially started when I lived in San Francisco (I've been in New York for a year). I grew up in San Francisco and spent my time attending live shows, meeting musicians, and connecting with them. I also noticed the direct correlation between musicians and their need for photos. Beyond that, I've found that they're incredible collaborators and usually have a strong personal style, which brings a fun element to shooting. I've enjoyed the challenge of listening to someone's music and interpreting that in a visual form - collaborating with them to figure out how they could be best represented. It’s led me down that path unintentionally. Through taking photos of musicians in San Francisco and social media, other musicians were seeing it and reaching out, and it just grew into this thing.

Marisa Bazan, Marisa & Asiram (Self-Portrait), 35mm film

Palmer: I’m assuming that if these musicians reach out through Instagram and other social media it widens the scope of what you’re discovering. 

Bazan: That’s kind of the main way I'm meeting people and how people are reaching out to me. Then through NME, that's been great for connecting with musicians and taking photos for them. The magazine hiring me more has been a dream come true because that's exactly what I want to do. 

Palmer: Is that the trajectory you want to aim for, especially with your photography, getting yourself into those wider publications?

Bazan: I think so. Honestly, I like doing both. Working for the magazine is fun because they have such a clear vision, and they set everything up with the studio, etc. But I also love collaborating with musicians directly, doing the more DIY, walk around, figure it out type of thing. I'm interested in pursuing more magazine work, but I don't think I'll ever stop working directly with people.

Palmer: I noticed on your website that ‘I don't like to talk about myself’ was the quotation for your ‘About’ section. Does your artwork allow you to talk about yourself without writing an ‘About’ section for your life? 

Bazan: Honestly, that’s exactly it. I feel like I thrive more in representing my feelings and emotions visually rather than just talking about myself. My work says more about me than I ever could.

Palmer: Does it offer a means of communicating different emotions through various forms, or do you gravitate to one specific emotion through your work?

Bazan: It’s a lot of different emotions depending on how I'm feeling. Having a larger body of work, I can go back and be like: ‘This is how I was feeling at this point.’ I think my collage work feels rawer, like, who I am and how I feel. Photography certainly can too, but that feels more like a connection between the subject and me - it's more of a collaboration.

Marisa Bazan, No Love Lost, Analog paper collage, 11x8.5 inches.

Palmer: When I look at your photography, I notice that it's very vibrant, and then I look at your collaging; it’s still colorful, but it adopts a different tone. Especially considering how you discuss your emotions concerning these two mediums, I find that comparison interesting. 

Bazan: I've definitely gravitated towards color. It's funny because there have been times when I'm like: ‘I wanna shoot black and white because I see so many photographers doing it, and I just love it.’ But whenever I have a roll of black and white in my camera, I'm like, god. I wish I had color. For me, there is such a direct correlation between mood and color. It’s such a strong emotion for me. Sometimes when I shoot color, I’m like: ‘I can change it to black and white later in editing’. I never do. I never make it black and white. It doesn't happen. 

Palmer: Collaging plays a primary role in your artistic process. How did you get into collage, where did the drive come from?

Bazan: I didn't start making art until after college (I studied humanities). I’ve always been a lover of art and very enthusiastic about it. I was also friends with many artists but felt too nervous and insecure to take the leap and start. I started getting into collage because, honestly, it felt like a lower barrier to entry. I found magazines that were rich with stories and symbolism, and eventually, I started flipping through them and cutting them up and it just exploded out of me. I was like, oh, my God, I have so much to say.

It started with vintage magazines, looking through old advertisements and creating stories by cutting things up and expressing my feelings. I was dabbling in photography too, but disposable camera stuff. As I started making these collages, I had all these things I wanted to say and all these images in my head of things I wanted to create. The magazines could only take me so far, I had to rely on what I was finding. By that point I wanted to make images where I had complete control over everything, that’s how I began to get serious with photography. The two were separate for a long time. But recently I’ve started making collages out of my photography, and I’m loving that. 

Palmer: What’s the physical process of making these collages? What’s the scale? Are you prit-sticking or glue-sticking? 

Bazan: I usually have several little things going on at once. I'll cut stuff up and won't use it right away. I have everything on my table, with different collages cooking all at once. Nothing's glued down, and I'm moving around. I'll be invested in something for an hour, and then I'll abandon it and start working on this other collage. It's very messy. It's very chaotic. And then it takes a lot for me to be like, okay: ‘This is it’.

I'm sure you've seen that I'm drawn towards mouth imagery and hands and fingers. So, if I find a great set of claws with red nails, I have to be sure that this is the piece I’m using it on. Once it's down, that's it. I can’t Photoshop it; it's analog. 

Marisa Bazan, Good Girl, Analog paper collage, 9.5x8.5 inches.

Palmer: That neatly brings us to my next question about your strong motifs, especially the mouth, snakes, nails and my particular favourite, the milk carton. Is there a reason those are the ones you’re drawn to? 

Bazan: When making these things, I'm not thinking: ‘I'm gonna use this because this means that’. I do it in reverse where I'm like: Why do I like this? Why am I so drawn to this? What am I trying to say? I explore the balance of good, bad, beautiful, and gross -  symbols that mean different things. That is why I’ve been drawn to that sort of imagery. 

Palmer: Your work addresses evocative subject matters, particularly in how you depict female bodies in your collages. Do you believe that collage as a medium holds the potential to be revolutionary, or at the very least, politically challenging? 

Bazan: These images strongly represent what it feels like to be a woman. We're beautiful and strong, but we also have these bodies. We're gross. We love each other. We hate each other. It's exploring all those human things and what it feels like for me as a woman in this crazy world we live in.

That's why I like those vintage magazines with the cookie-cutter imagery of the ideal woman. I try to reimagine them where I'm like, oh, actually, her stove's on fire. It’s not the perfect image. It’s meant to be empowering rather than a critique of that lifestyle.

Palmer: That leads to my next question about the zine you published, ‘Poached Legs’. I was wondering what that title means. I got the impression of a housewife poaching her eggs, but also the poaching of women's bodies in mass media. What was it that drew you to that specific title?

Bazan: It’s this play on words, of legs being symbolically sexual for a woman and the idea of poaching her legs rather than her eggs. It was a theme I was exploring in the zine because there are a lot of images of the housewife and cooking tied into the leg imagery. It challenged that idea of what a ‘traditional’ woman should be. 

Palmer: How was the process of creating the zine? 

Bazan: The one on the website is my fourth or fifth zine. It’s a therapeutic process to go through and lay everything out. That’s when I do a lot of my reflection because I can sit down, look at everything I’ve made and think about it visually. Especially how I'm gonna curate it, thinking about which images look nice next to each other. That's when I started to notice these themes. I played around with typography in the most recent one, which was new for me. That was a fun challenge. 

Palmer: How did that typography look in your work? 

Bazan: So, in most of my work I don't usually use any language or words, tying back to, ‘doesn't like to talk about herself’. But in these vintage magazines, there's so much typography to which I was drawn. But it was a matter of how I would do this, still representing myself without using someone else's words. I started taking little snippets of typography or sentences that resonated with me. Then I do this technique of dragging the text along while scanning, creating this warped effect on the type. It becomes a cryptic message, which I guess helps my insecurity about using words. 

Palmer: My final question is: Are there any upcoming artworks or projects you want people to know about? And how can people find your work and best support what you’re doing? 

Bazan: Anyone in the area who wants photos or has an idea, I'm always open to collaborating with people. The best way to check out my work is through Instagram. There are several upcoming projects I’m working on that I can’t reveal right now. But I've recently started dabbling in the video medium using a Super Eight camera and a VHS. It’s a learning curve but I’m enjoying working with visual motion. That will be coming in the next few months.

Palmer: That’s exciting to hear. Thank you for chatting with me today, Marisa.

Bazan: Thank you. WM