Photomontage and table-top

202 Photomontage and table-top

In the constant technical experimentation that characterized the performance of the photo club in São Paulo, photomontage was very present. It was fundamentally carried out as a construction of a maquette through a system of cutting and gluing fragments of photographs, which were then photographed again to produce the final result.

In this catalog segment, we have included the maquette and the printed copy of a photomontage by Japanese merchant Roberto H. Yoshida (1911–1978), who joined the FCCB in 1944.

From the end of the 1940s until the late 1950s, Yoshida also practiced the photographic genre known at the time as table-top, in which he quickly became prominent. The photographer himself published, in 1956, an article in the FCCB Bulletin, in which he defined table-top as follows:

Table-top, as the name itself suggests, means photography on a table. Naturally, it can also be done on the floor or anywhere else, depending on the convenience of the table-top photographer. It can, in this way, be similar to a still-life; although in table-top there is life; there is a miniature world, and, for this reason, in this genre of photography, I believe that the subjects should preferably be themes of humor, drama, sentiments, and wit. (…)1

1 Roberto H. Yoshida. “Table-Top”. Boletim Foto-Cine Clube Bandeirante, Official organ of the FCCB. São Paulo, year IX, nbr 100, June-July, 1956, p. 28.