I decided to create my virtual gallery on a website called Artsteps.
On this website you can walk around the spaces you make.
This was my process of creating this gallery
First I chose my space to work with. I chose this space.
I started to place my photos on the walls.
I chose to split the space into sections. I did this to make the gallery look neater
I chose to use this section to show my process in making my photomontages. I thought this was a good feature to add to my gallery.
Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. His experimental photographic collages, sound poetry, and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.
Hausmann, a founder member of the Berlin Dada group, developed photomontage as a tool of satire and political protest. The fragment of a German banknote behind the critic’s neck suggests that he is controlled by capitalist forces. The words in the background are part of a poem poster made by Hausmann to be pasted on the walls of Berlin.
Hausmann’s artistic contributions to Dada were purposefully eclectic, consistently blurring the boundaries between visual art, poetry, music, and dance. His “optophonetic” poems of early 1918 fused lyrical texts with expressive typography, insisting on the role of language as both visual and acoustic.
I chose to base my project on photomontage inspired by Raoul Hausmann. I edited the pictures in photoshop to create photomontages like his.
I thought my final pieces came out well. I explored something real and embedded in my family. I worked hard over the 3 days and produced something that i am happy with
I could have taken a better photo of my background, which was taken at an angle
I think this would look neater as a pan shot from the top and would have made my photomontages more effective. I didn’t really plan well enough. If I had planned better I would have realised this before entering the exam.
I also think the idea of picturing my grandads belongings might not have been the best choice because I don’t have many of his items. I could have made more content for this project if I thought of multiple ideas and did other photoshoots.
I can use this to not make these mistakes in a real exam.
History of Photo-montage (Europe 1910 onwards)
A photomontage is a collage constructed from photographs.
Historically, the technique has been used to make political statements and gained popularity in the early 20th century (World War 1-World War 2)
Artists such as Raoul Haussman , Hannah Hoch, John Heartfield employed cut-n-paste techniques as a form of propaganda…as did Soviet artists like Aleksander Rodchenko and El Lissitsky
Photomontage has its roots in Dadaism…which is closely related to Surrrealism
Pop Art developments (USA and UK 1950s-)
Photomontage was also used to great effect by various Pop Artists in the mid 20th Century
Pop art was a reaction to abstract expressionism and was similar to DADA in some ways
Many Pop Art images and constructions tackled popular consumerism, advertising, branding and marketing techniques
Pop art also explored political concerns such as war, and gender roles too
Some of my work in this project was inspired by Raoul Hausmann, a photomontage photographer. Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry, and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I.
The time period he produced in was the same period my project is based on. I made photomontages using my own photos and some using photos off the internet. I used the same background for each one, a photo I took of a wheat declaration from the red cross which my grandad kept after being freed from Santo Tomas.
I tried to show a small timeline from left to right, because the dates are marked at the top from the start of the occupation to the liberation of the Philippines.
This photomontage by Hausmann influenced mine as I focused on covering the eyes and mouth in my montage.
I focused on a newspaper timeline in this one, using cuts of different newspaper articles at the time.
Diana Markosian is an modern American artist of Armenian descent, working as a documentary photographer, writer, and filmmaker.
Diana Markosian (born in Moscow, 1989) takes an intimate approach to her photography and video storytelling, in work that is both conceptual and documentary.
Her projects have taken her to some of the remotest corners of the world, and have been featured in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Vogue Magazine. She holds a Masters of Science degree from Columbia University in New York. Her work is represented by Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire in Paris, France and Rose Gallery in Los Angeles, California.
When photographer Diana Markosian met her father after a 15-year separation, he said he had been looking for her and opened this suitcase filled with newspaper clippings, undelivered letters and a shirt for her brother’s future wedding. “Items my grandfather put aside in hopes of meeting us one day,” she says.
A clock is ticking loudly, drawing attention to the silence in the room where Magnum nominee Diana Markosian and her long-lost father sit across the dining table from each other. “What were you thinking about, when you wrote the letter?” asks Armenian-American photographer Diana. Her father replies, “I don’t want there to be pain. I want there to be love.” Love is what Diana and her father have been working towards after being separated for 15 years, before Diana tracked him down in Armenia. She captured the meeting in a video as part of a multimedia project, where raw feelings of abandonment, longing, awkwardness and distance are palpable.
This very personal style of photography has earned Diana countless awards and mentions on ‘ones to watch’ lists, as well as a Magnum nominee membership. However, it wasn’t always on the cards that her work would take this direction. She didn’t discover the key idea that shaped the way she tells stories until 2011, when she jotted down a passage from the 1995 independent movie Smoke by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster.
This photo inspired some of my photos. The photos of old belongings and pictures link into my work.
I focused my project on my grandads belongings. He died before I was born but he had an interesting life. I focused a lot one of his passports.
I chose one which was valid during a time he was working. I did this because he had a job on a boat, so the passport had many stamps from different locations across the world.
Part of the reason I chose to do my project on him is because I was named after him.
I also chose to base my project on this because he was captured in the war. While he was living in Manila, he was captured by the Japanese when they invaded. They put him in Santo Tomas Internment Camp, the biggest Japanese camp in the Philippines at the time.
It was not a concentration camp, but the conditions were very poor and prisoners barely got any food. This resulted in many dying from starvation. After the liberation by the Americans, they photographed the ones who survived.
My grandad kept a declaration of wheat given by the Americans after they liberated Santo Tomas.
I used this as a backdrop to take some of my photos:
I also used this to edit other photos on to
Image selection is an important step when doing a project. It narrows down the images you want to edit.
What
I will be photographing my grandads old belongings. He died before I was born, but his life was interesting as he was captured in the war by the Japanese while he was living in the Philippines.
Where
I will be photographing his belongings on a plain background at home
How
I will use sun lighting if I can and work with his belongings to make collages
When
Over the course of this week
Claude Cahun was a French surrealist photographer, sculptor, and writer. Cahun is best known as a writer and self-portraitist, who assumed a variety of performative personae. Cahun’s work is both political and personal.
Claude Cahun created some of the most startlingly original and enigmatic photographic images of the twentieth century. Prefiguring by over seventy years many of the concerns explored by contemporary artists today, the importance of her work is increasingly recognised.
Since her “rediscovery” over a decade ago, Claude Cahun has attracted what amounts to a cult following among art historians and critics working from postmodern, feminist, and queer theoretical perspectives. In 1986, Hal Foster dubbed Cahun “a Cindy Sherman avant la lettre.” Since then, photographs of Cahun posing in the 1920s and 30s in various dramatic settings and guises have been displayed alongside contemporary works.
The Jersey Heritage Trust collection represents the largest repository of the artistic work of Cahun who moved to the Jersey in 1937 with her stepsister and lover Marcel Moore, was imprisoned for activities in the resistance during the Occupation, and remained here after the war.
