Photomontage

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An imaginary world composed of photorealistic inanimate, human, and plant objects spurs a psychological impact upon the viewer.
An imaginary world composed of photorealistic inanimate, human, and plant objects spurs a psychological impact upon the viewer.
Photomontage showing what a complete iceberg might look like under water.
Photomontage showing what a complete iceberg might look like under water.

Photomontage is the process (and result) of making a composite photograph by cutting and joining a number of other photographs. The composite picture was sometimes photographed so that the final image is converted back into a seamless photographic print. The same method is accomplished today using image-editing software. The technique is referred to by professionals as "compositing", and in casual usage is often called "photoshopping".[1]

Contents

[edit] History

Author Oliver Grau in his book Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion notes that the creation of artificial immersive environments, arising as a result of technical exploitation of new inventions, is a long-standing human practice throughout the ages. Such environments as dioramas were made of composited images.

The first and most famous mid-Victorian photomontage (then called combination printing) was "The Two Ways of Life" (1857) by Oscar Rejlander, followed shortly by the pictures of photographer Henry Peach Robinson such as "Fading Away" (1858). These works actively set out to challenge the then-dominant painting and theatrical tableau vivants.

Fantastic photomontaged postcards were popular in the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

Many of the early examples of fine-art photomontage consist of photographed elements superimposed on watercolours, a combination returned to by (e.g.) George Grosz in about 1915. He was part of the Dada movement in Berlin which was instrumental in making montage into a modern art-form. They first coined the term "photomontage" at the end of the war, around 1918 or 1919. The other major exponents were John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baader. Individual photos combined together to create a new subject or visual image proved to be a powerful tool for the Dadists protesting World War I and the interests that they believed inspired the war. Photomontage survived Dada and was a technique inherited and used by European Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí. The world's first retrospective show of photomontage was held in Germany in 1931. A later term coined in Europe was "photocollage"; which usually referred to large and ambitious works that added typography and brushwork or even actual objects stuck to the photomontage.

Parallel to the Germans, Russian Constructivist artists such as El Lissitzky, Aleksandr Rodchenko and the husband-and-wife team of Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina created pioneering photomontage work as propaganda for the Soviet government.

The pioneering techniques of the early photomontage artists were co-opted by the advertising industry from the late 1920s onwards.

[edit] Techniques

Repetitive patterns created by the seams of individual images in David Hockney's "Pearblossom Highway" (1986) produce an internal tension within the overall composition.
Repetitive patterns created by the seams of individual images in David Hockney's "Pearblossom Highway" (1986) produce an internal tension within the overall composition.

Other methods for combining pictures are also called photomontage, such as Victorian "combination printing", the printing from more than one negative on a single piece of printing paper (e.g. O. G. Rejlander, 1857), front-projection and computer montage techniques. Much like a collage is composed of multiple facets, artists also combine montage techniques. Romare Berden’s (1912-1988) series of black and white "photomontage projections" is an example. His method began with compositions of paper, paint, and photographs put on boards 8 1/2x11 inches. Berden fixed the imagery with an emulsion that he then applied with handroller. Subsequently, he enlarged the collages photographically.

The 19th century tradition of physically joining multiple images into a composite and photographing the results prevailed in press photography and offset lithography until the widespread use of digital image editing. Contemporary photo editors in magazines now create "paste-ups” digitally.

Creating a photomontage has, for the most part, become easier with the advent of computer software such as Adobe Photoshop, Pixel image editor, and GIMP. These programs make the changes digitally, allowing for faster workflow and more precise results. They also mitigate mistakes by allowing the artist to "undo" errors. Yet some artists are pushing the boundaries of digital image editing to create extremely time-intensive compositions that rival the demands of the traditional arts. The current trend is to create pictures that combine painting, theatre, illustration and graphics in a seamless photographic whole.

[edit] The ethics of photomontage

A photomontage may contain elements at once real and imaginary. Two-dimensional representation of physical space in a picture is, by definition, an illusion. Such combined photos and digital manipulation can set up a collision between aesthetics and ethics - for instance, in faked news photographs that are presented to the world as real.

See: Photojournalism.

[edit] Scrapbooking photo-collage

Photomontage can also be present in the scrapbooking phenomenon, in which family images are pasted into scrapbooks and collaged along with paper ephemera and decorative items. This is now reported being an industry worth $2.5 billion; according to Minneapolis, Minnesota’s, WCCO television news citing the U.S. Hobby and Craft Assoc.

Digital scrapbooking employs a computer to create simple collaged designs and captions. The amateur scrapbooker can turn home projects into professional output, such as CDs, DVDs, display on TV, or uploaded to a website for viewing or assembly into one or more books for sharing.

See: Scrapbooking

[edit] Artists known for photomontage

Key photomontage artists include the following, listed alphabetical order:

[edit] References

  1. ^ David Geelan (2006). Undead Theories: Constructivism, Eclecticism And Research in Education. Sense Publishers. ISBN 9077874313. 

[edit] Further reading

  • Photomontage (World of Art series) by Dawn Ades. Thames & Hudson, 1989.
  • Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, MIT Press 2002; Cambridge, Mass. ISBN 0-262-57223-0
  • Adobe Master Class: Photoshop Compositing with John Lund, Adobe Press, 2003.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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