Photo Montage Art
The photomontages were created as follows.
Every photo I use in my photo montage art comes from my archive that I have built and archived over the last 40 years. I also made the photos that I use as a background for the texture in the photo montage. Those background photos can be, for example, close-ups of paintings, carpeting, the bark of a tree or foam on seawater. When making the photomontages, no software program is used, but I use the following technique. I start by printing the photos I want to use for composition. This is possible on two types of ‘paper’: vellum paper or transparent paper.
Usually, I print the background photos on transparent paper and the main photo on vellum paper. But that is not a dogma. Let me take two examples (Photo 1 and Photo 2 in the gallery below). For photo 1 I used three layers of photos, for photo 2 two layers (see photo 3). I placed the printed transparent photos on a Lightbox (photo right and photo 4). The combination of the light and the different transparencies creates unique effects. This also creates new compositions. When I’m satisfied with the result, I put a glass plate over it and take a new photo of it. I lightly edit that photo on the computer. Which layer I put on which layer depends on what I want to achieve with the composition. In addition to using this technique, each creation depends on knowledge of my photo archive, the idea of combining certain photos and ‘trial and error’.
