David Hockney Response

Here is my photo montage image in the style of David Hockney. To create this I took a series of photos of one subject (in this case my front door) and combined them all in photo shop to create one larger image. Then I merged all my layers to only one layer and adjusted Levels and Hue and Saturation.

I liked this image however I feel as if there is not an obvious link between all my pieces. I will redo this joiner picture with a full body portrait of a person, each image reflecting again on my idea of the conflict of the natural and unnatural world, and 'changing landscapes'. Then I will compose and edit it in photoshop, trying to reflect the style of Hannah Hoch like in my photo montage.

For this joiner photomontage I did as I said above, and took a series of photos to compose a full body portrait of a person, and another two series for landscapes reflect natural and unnatural world to be the background. Then to reflect the cutout style of Hannah Hoch I printed the composed joiner of a person, cut it out, maintaining the abstract joiner shape, and then I retook a photo of this and put it back on the image in photoshop. This meant that the person looked lower quality, as if from a newspaper photo (reflecting Hannah Hoch) and stood out against the variety of backgrounds. I separated the two sides of the backgrounds so that natural world was on one side, and unnatural on the other. In photoshop I gave the layer with the person a halftone pattern, to reflect newspaper print (like Hoch used) and colored the two sides of the landscapes appropriately. Red for unnatural, green for natural. These colors are also complementary.

Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch was a German artist of the Dada movement, she was one of the pioneers of photo montage. Her work is easily recognised by the sepia tones that reflect the epoch in which she lived, and the cut and paste style of the subjects in her final image.

Personal response to Hannah Höch

The above is my personal response in the style of Dada artist Hannah Höch, the main theme to my image is the conflict between the natural and unnatural world.

I began by finding the objects I would use, most of the photos I took myself however the cranberries and the large machine as stock images off the Internet. Then, to reflect the cut and paste style of Hannah Höch, I printed the images from my computer, cut out the object, and retook a photo of the cut-out. This gave the pictures a grainy effect and made them much easier to separate from the background.

To make my the background for my final image I filled the background layer with two shades of brown, fading from light brown on the left to dark brown on the light. I made a new layer filled with a cracked paint texture and set this to soft light.

Next I imported all the photos of my objects and arranged them accordingly, for the hand holding the translucent clock I made two seperate layers; one with the clock face the other with the hand. I lowered the transparency of the top layer and set it to multiply (top layer being the clock face), then using the magic wand tool I selected the background around the hand and inverted it. I then changed the mode of the lasso tool to 'subtract from selection' and selected so that only thumb is left.

Photomontage

In David Hockney's photomontage pieces he takes a series of different photographs of the same subject and places them together to create a collage. I particularly like how the maintains the rectangular shape of the photos and incorporates into the final piece the different angles and colors of the photos.

Yutaka Inagawa is a japanese artist that does a lot of work in photomontage, he uses very contrasting shapes, colors and lines to achieve abstract looking work. He creates his images from a wide range of contrasting and carefully cut out objects - these include machinery, fish, road signs, furniture - the subjects of the image are often juxtaposed with each other, he will combine the usual with the bizarre for example.