Most Friday’s we focus on camera techniques and on this specific day we focused on ‘focus‘ and ‘depth of field’. Using a DSLR camera we played around with the focus of an object, thus manipulating its depth of field, and the switch over between shallow and deep focus. Deep focus is when the object in the image is entirely focused on, shallow focus is when the background of an image is in focus but the object in the foreground is out of focus. The images above are my attempts at both. I did this by using manual focus.

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Initially this photograph made me feel intimidated and slightly creeped out, because of the expression on his face and the setting that the man is placed at looks abandoned. As well as this it give me the impression that I am being observed which develops a fear in me of being judged for being myself.

Natural light floods from above, illuminating most of the background setting, however the rest of the photograph is dark and the contrasts of the shadows with the light makes it eye catching and draws you in, to focus more on Alfred Kurpp’s face; where as the background is flooded with light. Its as if Arnold Newman was bringing to light all the bad things this evil man had done. Also I think that artificial light was bought in from a studio and were placed perpendicular to each other to make a more contrasted look on his face.

Arnold Newman is showing the world that they hadn’t caught all the evil men involved with world war 2 and that they missed out the man who had made weapons for Hitler and constructed the trains that lead to putting the jew’s in Auschwitz and other concentration camps.

• Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image.

The most famous ‘photomontage’ came during the mid-Victorian era. Then called “combination printing”, it was created by Oscar Rejlander, who was a pioneering photographer he one of the experts in the field. His 1857 collage photo ‘The Two Ways of Life was’ followed by the 1858 “Fading Away” by another artist, Henry Peach Robinson. By the end of the century, many other artworks came to life.

• For example: funny-looking postcards which often featured the wrong head stuck on a different body, or the creation of strange, impossible creatures.

In 1916, John Hartfield and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together, which nowadays is known as “Photomontage.” John Hartfield was the first person to use photomontage to tell a “story”. However the person who claimed that he and his companion, Hannah Hoch, “invented photomontage” was Raoul Haussmann.

In Hannah Hoch’s photomontages, she used other people’s visual elements to transform them into her larger pieces where these initially unrelated imagery would form insightful narratives. This is a strategy that many Dadaists and Surrealists have adopted. As she actively critiqued the society, her pioneering photomontage works often reflected gender issues and the woman’s role in a modern society.

By World War I, the method gained its first momentum, with photographers all over Europe producing postcards showing soldiers departing for battle with their loved ones seeing them off. More specifically, it was the Berlin Dada group that developed it as a tool of protest against the war and other political issues of the period, turning it into a proper modern art form.

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Here, I have used canvas size and stroke, adding a white border (that cannot be seen when uploaded on a white background like this blog for example). As well as the white canvas around outside of the photo, I also added a thin black line around the perimeter to help separate the image.

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Then, I started to alter the border colours.

For this first photomontage, I used one of my flat lay shots from my summer task. I wanted to add in even more relics into the frame but still make it look as real as possible.