Photomontage Initial thoughts
The example in the study guide reminded me of scrapbooking, which is fun but not the challenge I wanted. I brainstormed some ideas for social and political events, drawing on inspiration from Peter Kennard and Cat Philips. Whilst I looked at the work of Hannah Hoch I found it uninspiring and out-dated. I can see that nearly a century ago her work in compositing parts of photographic prints and textured media, and colouring them, was most likely very innovative and definitely part of the school of Dadoism. But from my point of view technology has advanced so much that this sort of collage risks being stale and dull. With millions of images only a few clicks away and software which allows us to assemble those pictures with ease we can be more sophisticated – especially with the brief of exploring a political message.
The Father 1920
As my mood board shows, everything other than the corona virus and the recent social unrest seems irrelevant right now in terms of the big stories in our lives. The idea of the madness of crowds seemed to gel from this process. For the corona virus I wanted to express my opinions around over-reaction, panic and the carefree abandon with which many people have treated the change in lockdown. The scenes of packed beaches and hysterical queuing for junk food fuelled my imagination. With the recent discrimination protests I wanted to express an idea which the shouting frenzied mob would never want to hear. Their fixation with the past ignores the present and the on-going exploitation of the poorest in society. We’re all guilty of this but I had a need to visually highlight the hypocrisy in the destruction of venerable artefacts when there’s a more pressing need to put that energy in to helping the most vulnerable.
Photomontage and meaning After reading the notes and exploring this subject I realised that photomontage is all around us and in a wide range of forms and has been for generations. Some of these forms appeal to me but others I can’t bring myself to appreciate. In Beyer’s work, he montages everyday objects into a surreal Dali-esque world of abstract weirdness. It’s interesting on one level, and I would imagine that in 1936 Shortly Before Dawn was well received, as a huge contrast to the literal photographic image capture of the world. There’s meaning in the image, if you have a surreal mindset and are prepared to play the game of applying deep significance to unusual images. Herbert Beyer. Shortly before dawn. 1936
Hannah Hoch’s photomontages are more literal, and she builds a narrative out of reassembling photographs and images of everyday objects into a new scene. In ‘Seven League Boots’ she’s taken photographs of an ice skater and some mountains and composited them over graphics of houses to represent a giant striding entity, although I have to confess that I could not find the motivation to attempt to understand the snail metaphor. And I think we should leave that as a mystery for evermore… As with a lot of abstract art I feel the cult of the personality in this artist’s work and wonder if there is an intoxicating and selfperpetuating cycle of pleasing the audience just a little too much. This is niche stuff.
As technology has changed photo montaging (I guess that’s a word) has become available to a much wider range of artists. The Kennard Philips composition Cerbellum skilfully superimposes a crumbling hospital on to the former Prime Minister’s head with a sophistication unimaginable even a couple of decades ago. This is clearly not a favourable message being delivered and the lighting, angle and facial expression in the original photograph have been carefully chosen to project a less than flattering aura. In a more loving tone, I admire the work of Bobby Neel Adams and his ‘Age Maps’ project, where he poses models identically with their younger selves and produces thought-provoking KennardPhilips Cerebellum,2017
compositions centred on aging. The photocomposition is minimal and
with a careful digital seam between the two portrait images he plays with the concept of lost youth or the future to come. It is flattering, elegantly simply and sophisticated. [After I wrote this, I noticed that my examples are both monochrome. Perhaps this is a personal bias I have? I can see that black and white simplifies a lot of the photo montaging process by getting rid of the need to match the colours carefully in a composited image. ] It’s clear that we can either distort the original meaning of an image in a photomontage so that’s it’s no longer recognisable, perhaps by removing the previous context, or we can emphasise the meaning by exaggerating or juxta positioning it. That is what I intended to do. I aimed to take contemporary images, mostly from news stories, and composite them together for greater effect and to create a new narrative. I wanted the narrative to be within the realms of truth and not a Hoch-style act of freakish abstract attention seeking. I had the notion, at the outset, that sometimes the story I’d like told cannot literally be seen in one picture in the real world, but this can be done by pulling in other images in to an assembly of clarity. I also wanted to experiment with telling a story that is a metaphor but uses snapshots of life which are cut and pasted together in to a bolder and more powerful message. I did not want to introduce panels of colour or texture, because I did not want to have blank spaces that needed filling.
I decided I would fill my composition with photographs and chose them carefully so that if I wanted space, I’d pick an original image which included it. I was also nervous about avoiding a scrap book effect, which although attractive can very easily become cliched or sickly sweet or just immensely busy.
To push a political message I feel there needs to be both simplicity and quiet irony or resonance. A modern and in-your-face political campaign image will rely heavily on text to support photographs, and probably less on graphics. Although there’s often an element of photomontage, I think the brief is asking for a more deliberate and perhaps slightly abstract assembly of elements than a neatly aligned set of manicured layers. I’ll therefore tell my political and social messages just with photographs, with some use of colour, but let the way I position and scale the pictures speak for themselves. I won’t try to send a pretentious or clever message but will use this task as a way to explore story telling.
I also want to steer clear of ‘fake news’. This recent example of a girl appearing to be rescuing a koala from raging bushfires is as real as Blair’s selfie in the oil field. However, unlike the Kennard Philips political satire this image fooled a lot of internet users, who believed the carefully constructed visual lie. Unless there’s a story which I’m passionate about telling truthfully, which needs to challenge a wrongful or immoral social media presence I don’t think I would ever want to create a fake image of this magnitude. It’s unfair to the audience as it’s easily taken at face value. Blair, whatever we think of him, would never have taken a smiling self portrait in front of an inferno. The audience would always recognise it as satire. The picture here is all too easy to believe as a true rendition of an event.
Misrepresenting the truth is a dangerous game for us to play, individually and as a society, and the artistic community has to respect the boundaries. However with photo editing software now on every computer and mobile device there is no possibility of having a collective conscience in the art world, so this becomes a very personal line to walk.
Runny nose rampage The theme is the madness of the masses. First attempt I experimented with a range of layouts and my initial version was a panoramic narrative, which really does need a big screen to see in full detail.
In this montage, read from left to right, we see the transition from the initial patient, through to lockdown and then mass freedom and panic, which reminded me of animals stampeding. The flow of people from all directions leads to the beach, and while this social distancing collapse is occurring others suffer from the disease, with a vacated hospital bed the final image of the montage. This was a beast of a composition and involved thirty images, which in itself took quite a bit of research. I opted for monochrome to remove the distraction of colour in the work and make the story the focus. I was unhappy with the finished product because its aspect ratio made display difficult and detail, such as the MP meercats I created, were lost. I decided to revise this piece and focus on the action in the centre of the image, which I felt was dynamic and powerful.
Final piece I included statues of Churchill and Nightingale in the original piece because I felt they brought an authoritative and historic voice to the argument through their pose and legacy. These elements were lost in the panorama, but if you look for them, they are there! I wanted Churchill because of his famed unifying power, his current villain status in the eyes of some, and because he represents the spirit of survival against an evil enemy. He is also, of course, known for his “fight them on the beaches” speech and I wanted to visually pun this in my composition. I found a rear view of the Churchill statue and loved the metaphor that this suggests. I tried a range of positions and sizes for him but eventually chose the right hand side of the composition and made him gigantic, to reflect my feeling about his importance and the feelings that the wartime generation would probably have around the behaviour of modern society.
After a few false starts I began the montage by assembling the background, choosing a grassy foreground and an ominous sky. The sneezing woman returned, and with some adjustments so did the multiple layers of running people. I loved the stampeding bison and the sheep, so they remained also. New elements in this composition include the sign for the beach, a trampled social distancing board and some scary looking virus particles which I merged into the clouds behind the woman’s head. The powerful image of mass graves, from Ireland, had to be given more prominence in this piece, so I made it merge with the final destination of the sheep. See what I did there? To give the composition a bit more energy and a dynamic feel I brought four small parts of the composition outside of the main image and into the border. I felt this added depth and subconsciously suggested real-time and ongoing movement. On the next pages I present two versions of this finished piece. The first is in colour, but I have used a saturation filter to minimise it and again to avoid distraction from saturated colours or sudden changes in colour across the image. Colour really is not part of the story here. So, in the second image I’ve opted for monochrome.
Reflections on Runny Nose Rampage This piece took hours to construct and involved dozens of layers and a lot of background removal. I hope it tells an exaggerated but relatable story of the public reaction to the corona virus. I’m most pleased with the compositing of the virus images in to the sky - it was a subtle part of the complete image but is perhaps something which people might notice on their second viewing, and I like that idea of having hidden detail. My test audience liked the parts which extend into the image’s borders and told me that it reminded them of a movie. So that seems as if it worked. I would not change this composition.
Cabot, the irony I grew up near Bristol and know this part of the harbourside well. Colston’s statue was just another feature of an historic area of the city and so has no particular meaning to me. However, for some people in Bristol it’s clearly a focus of a lot of negative thoughts right now. The ripping down of any statue is a powerful statement at any time. In the original news photograph the emotions are clear but so also is the sense of spectating and simply being part of the event. I am not being political in how I process this image, just trying a way to highlight another perspective which can be applied to the events. I do not particularly like the composition of this photograph. The horizontals are not correct, there’s some unsightly foreground confusion on the left of frame and the sky is totally over-exposed.
But it is a gritty-reality kind of image, snapped in the moment, and I decided that on the grounds of it being a future historic image I wouldn’t make any adjustments to the photograph. (The image above is slightly cropped to show some details clearer).
Motivation For many years I have been aware of exploitation in the clothing and electronics industry. There have been frequent news stories of allegations of child labour and pittance pay in the fashion industry, with famous brand name items often being singled out. I know that in many parts of the world people of all ages are enslaved by low wages and shocking working conditions, and I always feel guilty when I buy new clothes for myself or my children. When I saw the image of the crowd pulling down the statue I couldn’t help but see the juxtaposition of the mob wearing and holding the output of the modern oppressed whilst enraged with a man from hundreds of years ago. It is painfully ironic, and combined with Cabot (another famous old father of Bristol) this gave me the title for this piece.
Creation I wanted to highlight the clothes and electronics devices of the protestors and finally decided to go with blocks of colour. This was a laborious photoshop masking job but worth the time investment. The statue looked rather dull, so I gave it a bronze tint, to make it more prominent in the image but also made sure that the tone was more muted than the blues and reds I used later. I then found some images of people working in terrible conditions and decided to build them in a subtle way into the composition. Originally, I tried using them as a panel on the right-hand side of the composition, but this looked a bit contrived and political. I wanted my message to be less shouty and obvious. So instead I placed the pictures on the roof of the building behind the crowd which helped to signify the people being overlooked and irrelevant. To tie these images in to the main scene I coloured them, with blue for the clothing industry and red for electronics. I thought for quite a while about the colours to use and chose red for the digital media because of its association with danger and the direct link between electronic devices, social media and the growth and communication of the protestors. Blue had no meaning in this image, as it is simply used to highlight the crowd’s clothes and shoes. As a fellow primary colour with red there is a confident synergy between the colours. Finally I applied red and blue layer masks to the clothing of the crowd and to their devices and used a hue-saturation adjustment layer to knock back the colour in the main image, as the colour was at times distracting and also unnecessary in the story.
Reflections I could have turned this into a scrapbooking exercise and composited pretty pictures and textures together, but this seemed like an opportune time to try something more serious and personal. Whilst this is a photomontage of 5 source separate images I feel as if the message I am putting across is far more important and worthy of consideration than the collage of hamsters and hamster cage accessories which first came to mind. Throughout the creative process I kept the raw image unchanged and simply added elements to it. A day after completion I decided to change the photomontage by a little cropping and rotating. My rationale was to focus the attention more onto the foreground. As interesting as the mass of people is behind the statue, they add little to the composition other than a sea of blue clothing.
So, the image on the right is the product of the change, and I do not like it. Whilst we can see the image of modern-day slavery more clearly, I instantly felt that I had lost the energy in the composition by removing the background crowd and the sense of urgency that the original slightly wonky photograph implied.
The right-hand side of the original image provides a blank space. It gives your eye a break from the chaos of the left-hand side. It also adds physical space and context to the image and without it the story is less vivid and memorable.
Exploring further
I felt that after the effort of creating the layer masks there was more to extract from this composition. The brief strongly suggested that the message should be bold and political, so I attempted that. I brought the modern child slavery images down from the roof of the building and positioned them to frame both the protestors and the empty space of water and highlight the message. To represent a perspective on the angry crowd I chose a typical political slogan that in a way represents my views of the their blindness to current global issues. I used the red text as a metaphor for blood and anger with an assertive black background panel to bring the message home. White text was less aggressive but the black and white combination just didn’t work with the muted colours and greys. It was too disrtacting. Overall I felt this was too shouty (that’s not really me) and was unbalanced.
Next step To balance the composition, I needed to use the empty space in the image. Text was lost in this area. I wanted to exploit eye direction through the piece. From my interpretation of the photograph there’s a natural direction of top left to bottom right, and another one off in to the background and to the right. So, this brackets the water. I then spent some time thinking about what would work best in this space. I could’ve gone all educational and used an infographic or statistics, but this felt like an image that didn’t need any additional story telling. It needed more power and thought-provoking imagery to slam the message home. And so I found these two poor people. Lisa Kristine (https://www.lisakristine.com/portfolio-items/survivors-ghana/) had photographed two survivors of brutality and exploitation and their tragic pained expressions and eyeline worked powerfully with what I wanted to achieve.
This was my first attempt at the revised layout.
I moved Abeiku so that he appeared to be looking directly at the Cabot statue and aligned the crop line on his head to match the orientation of the dock wall in the background. I removed the bold political statement and represented it as smaller text.
Standing back from the composition I felt that the survivor image did not hit home – it was too small and lost.
So, I enlarged it and knocked the text back to white to make it more subtle.
This was a lot more powerful. But now the whole image looked too washed out. So as a final adjustment I increased opacity of the background image and I present two versions, with differing brightness and contrast.
I prefer the final version above, as the reds are more blood coloured and the contrasts bring out the features, and pain, in the faces of the victims of exploitation.
Final thoughts I am not political but do have opinions. This was an interesting composition to create. I tried to tell a story through the photomontages, without physically distorting the individual photographs. I did this because I don’t like the fake news and distortions that are so common now. I only wanted to cut out relevant parts or characters in a hidden story and assemble them to get a bigger picture across – either as a metaphor (in the Runny Nose Rampage or as a juxtaposition, as in the statue riot. I am proud of the riot composition because it’s projecting a message without shouting and the use of colour is bold, but not over-powering, and shows an alternative way of interpreting the information in a photograph. Photomontages are everywhere in our daily lives and when done well we take them for granted. But I now feel as if this is a medium that I could explore if I want to deliver a powerful message in an engaging way.