What is a photo montage?

Photo montage is when you make a different photograph but cutting, sticking, rearranging and overlapping different photos to create a different feel to the image. I developed my own photo montage which is below.

For this photo montage experiment i first chose a couple of images which i took from my bunker shoot as well as a few famous images which were found on the ‘archive folder’ in the media drive as well as the internet. I printed these images out as i decided to produce my photo montage by hand. These images were printed in both black and white as well as colour.

I experimented with combining my images by eye and by write notes on the type of edits i could do to particular images. This allowed me to plan my ideas before doing them on paper and deciding i don’t like it. When i found the images i wanted to use and the ways i wanted to combine them, i then did so.

First attempt at photo montage

Images i decided to use in photo montage

From the images above i made the photo montage below. This was made from the image on the top right hand corner which i got from the media drive, a well as the second image on the bottom left hand side which i took myself at the bunker. These images i found went well and i chose them because of the writing interesting me and i though it would be a cool concept to layer the image i had taken on top of the other one. The two seperate images share the topic of attacks which we can tell from the JEP’s title ‘The German Counter Attacks Against Invasion Troops’ and the edited image from the quote ‘ keep calm and obey orders’.

The image below isn’t one of my best pieces however i used an image i took which is shown on the bottom right hand side, second in, as well as the image next to it which i did not take. I wanted to in corporate the writing as the writing was speaking about a dead person who was killed. Therefore i found that this had a small link to the main image which is a doll in a plastic bag. I implicitly thought that this doll could have been in the war because of the clothing he was dressed in, which helped a decision to use the evacuation images behind the writing to add the concept of Germany. Because of this i found that these two elements made a weird photo montage.

I again used one image of my own, as well as an image which was found on the archive drive. The image below was adjusted my cutting out the circle in the main image with a cutting knife as it was a black circle. The black circle used to suggest that there were electronics inside this object, and you would have to look into the machine to see them. Because of this i also cut out the man using binoculars to see. These were both used because they are both to the same topic of ‘looking’.

Second attempt at photo montage