"Collage" hails from a group of similarly titled compositions that Callahan made in 1956–1957. He created collages of clippings from fashion magazines—of women’s heads, facial features, and body parts—and then photographed the result. The massing of imagery in these works speaks both to the artist’s formal investigation of pattern as well as his interest in popular culture, evinced along this wall by his photographs of neon and shopfront window displays. More broadly speaking, Callahan’s collage compositions serve as a metaphor of his work as a whole, each of his photographs being but one fragment of the larger world.