RE-CREATION

STEVE GEER FRPS

In 2019 I had some minor surgery. For a few months I was unable to walk very far or carry very much. Heavy camera gear and new photoshoots were out. Wishing to remain photographically creative, I decided to revisit my repository of underutilised images and try my hand at photomontage. Once I began sacrificing images on the digital cutting table and combining the pieces my imagination took over. I became absorbed and the result was Re-Creation , a series of six large photomontages.

To create the series, I began by selecting images that could be used to make a background – the stage and scenery into which the cut-out actors would be placed. Unused images from a recently completed project, Skyscraper Magic (see Creative Eye Magazine, issue 81, January 2020), provided the raw material to make structured architectural backdrops. The Skyscraper Magic images were taken in Chicago with my camera pointing straight-up in places where two walls of glass meet to form an alcove on the outside of a tall building. This is the geometry of a giant kaleidoscope and the resulting views of nearby buildings and their reflections are kaleidoscopic.

For my photomontage backgrounds I arranged four copies of a single Skyscraper Magic image into a seamless 2x2 grid to form a kaleidoscope-like backdrop. To relieve the overwhelming symmetry, certain areas of the backdrop were masked out to reveal, as if seen through one or more windows, another image, a landscape or a cloudscape. This was my stage, complete with its scenery. Now I needed the actors. At one time I had been interested in wildlife photography and made many images of birds and bugs and other beasties. This fauna was soon inhabiting my backdrops. Once I had recovered sufficiently from surgery to go out a bit, I supplemented my old wildlife images with new photographs made by visiting museums and using my easy-to-carry phonecamera to record the stuffed animals on display.

Photomontages are dreamlike inventions that mix reality with fantasy. They are not meant to depict the real-world as-is. Their power lies in the way they provoke the imagination by bending the rules of gravity and optics, and by suggesting relationships between unrelated things. As I introduced and positioned the pieces within each composition, I found myself thinking about the arrangement of the many elements, and how shadows, reflections and projective geometry inform our reading of a two-dimensional image as a three-dimensional view.

Photomontage has been popular since the early days of photography. In Victorian England, socially accepted forms of artistic expression were somewhat limited to women, but photomontage was on the OK-list. Ladies of leisure produced books of photocollages with sometimes spectacular combinations of cut-out photographs and hand-coloured drawings.

These wonderful works of art often associated images of family members with those of famous visitors. They therefore conveyed a strong social message. In the 1920s and 1930s photomontage was adopted more broadly by the artistic movements of the time, becoming popular as a technique of design and political propaganda. Hence, photomontage and messaging seem to be intertwined. Making my own photomontages was a little bit like writing a story. Each new element I added developed the plot. As writer

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William Burroughs once said of photo collage “… as a flexible hieroglyph language of juxtaposition: A collage makes a statement. ”

Producing the series ReCreation was both absorbing and time-consuming, which made it good therapy. I’m back out and about making new images with my camera, and further expanding my repository of both utilised and underutilised images. It’s reassuring to know that if for any reason I cannot create new photographs in the future, I have plenty of old material to use in new ways.