In order to experiment with photo-montage, I have decided to create a response to the artist Peter Kennard. His work focuses on portraying his views on political and social issues, such as war, politicians and environmental concerns. His work often criticizes the use of nuclear weapons, and highlights the importance of protecting the earth and innocent lives from the consequences of war
Below is a montage of the work of Kennard that challenges the current politics and social issues:
Taking inspiration from Kennard, and his criticisms of politics, the first photo-montage I created involved using Photoshop to cut and paste different facial features of different well known politicians onto the face of the current prime minister of England. For this image, I have taken inspiration from an image created by Peter Kennard, who used an image of the prime minister and photos-shopped another politician into her head. This is a statement made by Kennard voicing his opinion on UKIP, and the decisions made by the politicians involved.
The image I have created also criticizes the current political situation of the UK, and incorporates the same style as Kennard (using a black and white color scheme, and using a black background in order to draw maximum attention to the image in the foreground).
As well as criticizing politics, Kennard also uses his photo-montage work to criticize the physical state of the world and environment. He uses photo-montage to show his opinions on how human activity destroys and disrupts the environment.
In order to further experiment with photo-montage, I decided to take inspiration from Kennards work revolving around criticisms of environmental issues, and created the following photo-montage:
This image uses the same color scheme (grey-scale) as Kennard, which helps to emphasis the image in the foreground. As well as taking inspiration from Kennards work for the color scheme, I have also used a plain black background, as I feel like this allows for the image in the foreground to warrant maximum attention of the viewer, and helps to show the issue presented in the montage as an issue separate from anything else, allowing the viewer to focus all attention on the issue at hand.
After looking further into Kennards work, I have produced a variety of images that take inspiration from his photo-montage style, but do not replicate his work exactly (they include some original ideas and concepts). Below are the results of this:
