Photo Montage

What is meant by Photo Montage in this class will be strictly a style of image making that utilizes many small images to form a whole. One of the most important practitioners of this style of photomontage is David Hockney. Hockney is both a painter and photographer. Probably his interest in photography started as a means to take "notes" of things he anticipated painting or incorporating into larger paintings. This use of photography led him to discover the means by which he later made entire photographic images based on a "montage" of many small views combined to form a complete scene.

The style is reminiscent of a style of painting known as "cubism" because of the strange fracturing of subjects due to the purposeful misalignment of the separate images (prints) used to render it.

Here, you can see that such a close point of view resulted in some distortion. Also notice, in a similar way that you can rotate yourself to shoot a series of photos that will create a panorama montage, you can also move the point of view vertically to get a wide angle of view from ground to sky.

I suggest that you use a normal to long lens with as small of an aperture as possible. I also suggest that you move laterally for horizontal compositions, in order to reduce the distortion that comes from having the same point of view.

David Graves Pembroke Studios London Tuesday 27th April 1982
1982
Composite Polaroid
51 3/4 x 26 1/4 in (131.4 x 66.7 cm)
Collection David Hockney

Hockney, David
Kasmin Los Angeles 28th March 1982
1982
Composite Polaroid
41 3/4 x 29 3/4 in (106 x 75.6 cm)
Collection David Hockney

Hockney, David
Mother I, Yorkshire Moors, August 1985 #1
1985
Photographic collage
18 1/2 x 13 in (47 x 33 cm)
Collection David Hockney

Hockney, David
Place Furstenberg, Paris, August 7,8,9, 1985 #1
1985
Photographic collage
35 x 31 1/2 in. (88.9 x 80 cm)
Collection of the artist