A form of creative work where paper and other generally flat objects are pasted to canvas, board, etc. Often the pasted material is combined with other media (painting, pen and ink, etc), but sometimes an entire work is composed of pasted paper together. Typically the paper materials are printed matter from mass media (newspapers, magazine ads, and so forth) and may include photographs, though a work that is mainly or entirely constructed from photos, even if they are mass printed, is usually referred to as a photomontage.
Digital collage is a contemporary approach that uses programs like Photoshop to assemble new compositions from found and altered images.
Collage originally entered high art with the experiments of Picasso and Georges Braque in the 1910s. The Dadaists picked up on the idea (their work partly owes its inspiration to advertising, which sometimes created photomontaged images for newspaper and magazine ads), and they delighted in juxtaposing images of the natural with images of technology, fragments of words, and ultra-busy agglomerations of the mass media images that people were (and are) bombarded with every day, to create surreal “encounters” between images from different contexts.