In order to make my photomontage images I printed out some of my own photographs and combined them with archive images found in the Jersey Evening Post. After this, I used tea to give the paper a brown colour that aged the images to look similar to authentic images from the 1940s.
Lightroom helps you import, organise, manage and find your images. Lightroom is a photo management and photo editing combined into a single tool.
I started experimenting with Lightroom by using my images from the Battery Moltke photo shoot. The steps below show how Lightroom is the best manipulation software for the selecting and editing process of images.
I started with my first edit, by simply flagging the different images as either rejected images of picked images. I then went on to rate the different images between 3 and 5 stars in order to decide which images to retouch. Any images 4 stars and above would be considered for retouching.
Here I experimented using black and white as well as using high contrast. I also adjusted the B&W color levels in order to help make the main subject stand out more.
In photo-montage I digitally recreated some of the photo-montage I created using my prints.
Battery Moltke is an uncompleted World War 2 coastal artillery battery in St Ouen in the North West of Jersey. It was constructed by Organisation Todt for the Wehrmacht during the Occupation of the Channel Islands. The site includes bunkers, gun emplacements and the Marine Pelistand 3 tower, which are located on Les Landes. The main purpose of the battery was to defend St Ouen’s Bay in case there was an attack by the Allies.
On permanent display outside is a heavy French First World War field gun, that has been restored and put back in its original emplacement having been recovered from the bottom of the cliffs at Les Landes by the Occupation Society in 1991. All of Jersey’s 29 heavy coastal artillery guns were dumped over the cliffs in a massive clean up operation ordered by the States of Jersey after the liberation whose demand was “We want this island cleansed of the taint of German Occupation”.
The MP3 tower is one of nine planned towers in Jersey, to observe targets at sea. The tower is located at the top of a steep, sloping, west facing cliff. It has seven floors including a windowless underground floor and a walled top deck where a Seetakt radar was located. MP3 can be visited on special guided tours of the Les Landes defenses which the CIOS conducts. The Channel Islands Occupation Society (CIOS) is a voluntary organization that wants to study all aspects of the German Occupation of the Channel Islands and raise awareness and educate the public about the Occupation during the Second World War.
On the 10thof June our class went on a photography trip to see the bunkers located at Battery Moltke. A CIOS member began the tour by giving us insight into what the German Occupation was like in Jersey. The tour guide showed us images from World War 2 and told us his experiences as a young boy after the war had ended. We also explored the principle bunker which had been turned into a museum. There were several underground tunnels connecting to rooms where the public could see objects that were used during the Occupation.
Born in 1891, he was a Russian artist, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer. He was one of the most versatile artists to come out of the Russian Revolution, he discovered photography and photo-montage later in life, his photography at the time was socially engaged and went against artistic norms at the time. He was first inspired to create photo-montages by the DADA movement which had the purpose of ridiculing the meaninglessness of the modern world. Rodchenko first started experimenting in the medium, using found images from 1923/24 as well as his own images.
His first published photo-montage illustrated Mayakovsky’s poem, “About This”, in 1923. In 1924, Rodchenko produced his most famous poster, an advertisement for the Lengiz Publishing House sometimes titled “Books”, which features a young woman with a cupped hand shouting “книги по всем отраслям знания” (Books in all branches of knowledge), printed in modernist typography. In the early 1930s he embraced photography as a tool for social commentary, critically depicting the disparity between the idealized and lived Soviet experience. The images he made contrasted with Socialist Realism, which was declared the official style of art in the Soviet Union in 1934.
“One has to take several different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.”
