Sticking it all together ... Composite Photography
- Chris Hilton
- Nov 23, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Nov 23, 2025
How? Photorealistic montage, joiners, multi layered three dimensional photographic art, and old school ...
The last two meetings, one on zoom and one at the hall, have been dedicated to the art of montage. And it is in the spirit of that visual reordering of things that we are going to start a sentence with 'and', then start our analysis in the middle ... with Stephen Wilkes.
Thirty hours up a cherry picker, thousands of images, and half a lifetime on a computer stiching them together to give a seamless blend from night to day. A chunk of time, compressed into the blink of an eye and presented to us in a way that would be impossible for us to see for ourselves. It's a scene that both exsisted , and didn't, at the same time. Presented in a photorealistic way ... you can't see the joins.
Sounds grandiose? Actually, a rather modest description when compared to the man himself describing his work at a TED talk.
But with David Hockney ... you 'can' see the joins ... in fact, that's what he calls them ... Joiners. Hockney's joiners also explore time, but more importantly, the limitations of photography itself.
"There is nothing wrong with photography, if you don't mind the
perspective of a paralysed Cyclops ... for a split second."
David Hockney
Here, six by fours from the local '1 Hour' lab are placed in a way to show the workings of a photoshoot where the famed Annie Leibovitz is photographing the red trousered Hockney in a snow covered Mojave Desert. It doesn't fill the frame, there is lots of 'white space' but it's easy for us to make sense of it because the leading lines and the vanishing point are all still coherent. It is a feature of Hockney's Joiners that lines flow through the images to hold them together. To hear the man himself; why not pop over to The South Bank Show? Worth it for the theme tune alone!
If you'd like to delve into the mechanics of it all (and have a little help with the process) take a look at Mrs Cook's Art Class ...
There have been lots of photographers, myself included, that have been interested in taking these slices of time and putting them together in a non photorealistic way ...
One of them, Stephen McNally, was beamed into the club via the intermerweb a week ago. He came to show us, what he calls 'Photographic Cubism' ... in Stephen's work, the joins are accentuated by the use of a Lensbaby. A small lens that moves in the same way as the bellows on an old plate camera, it can be used to soften and distort what is infront of the sensor. Stephen adds to the feel of his work by blending in textures from the scene.
Another photographer that uses the joins in the images to add to the overall effect is Fong Qi Wei.
Rooted, very obviously, in the digital age; the finished image is a mile away from Hockney but the principles of stretching and compressing time are the same.
We can also play with this type of photo montage without having to spend thirty hours in a cherry picker. There are various tutorials online ... the point of looking at them is not to slavishly copy someone else's work but to learn techniques and use use them to create something unique to you.
We watched a short video about Abigail Reynolds whose approach to photmontage is three dimensional, using cuts and layers of images to create something a bit more sculptural. It's important to say that whilst Abagail uses old printed material like books and brochures ... for the purposes of a camera club, and more particularly for the purposes of next years photo montage competition, all of the work needs to a photograph. If you want to use old material then photograph it first and use that.
Here is Abigail talking about some of the techniques that she employs ... it is a very hands on, analogue way of creating a photomontage and is perfect for those of us without 'top notch' Photoshop skills.
At the club, we were taken on a whistle stop tour of some early photomontage by the likes of Henry Peach Robinson and William Notman, before briefly looking at some more up to date work by the likes of Jerry Uelsmann and Gemma Pepper before arriving in revolutionary Russia looking at the likes of Rodchenko.
Aleksandr Rodchenko was part of a stable of artists in Revolutionary Russia that were looking to break everything that had come before in the world of art and photography. In the beginning, they were doing just that, but as time went on, they ended up serving the state and being instrumental in the Stalinist Proganda Pamphlets that proliferated the USSR.
Somewhat similar in style but definetly not serving the State was DaDa ... anti-establishment, anti-war, anti-art, even anti each other.
Born out of the horrors of the Great War, their first exhibition in Berlin, the walls adorned with photomontage by the likes of Hannah Hoch, featured a German soldier with a pigs head hanging from the ceiling.
So anti-establishment that John Heartfield made it to number five on Hitler's most wanted list.
"To think that DaDa will ever die is an absurdity. DaDa will always emerge anew one way or another, always when too much stupidity has amassed."
Kurt Schwitters
And so it has come to pass ... welcome to the world of Cold War Steve ...
Political satirist that is undoubtedly at least number five on a lot of people's lists ...
And now for something completely different ...
Monty Python, Terry Gilliam was a photomontage animator ... we often we hear people talking about continuity in film and television ... Terry Gilliam was all about discontinuity ... he thrived in the gaps where things are supposed to be smooth. In a time when television was still revered the cartoon foot going through the set was an anarchic nod to DaDa ...
Interested in art, architecture and photography Terry's work (especially from Monty Python and the Holy Grail) has more than a passing reference to the bizarre world of the sixteenth century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch ...
Hieronymus Bosch ... activist, agitator, a python and a photo montage artist five hundred years before anyone else!
