Photomontage: combining photographs
Art & Design · Key Stage 2 · The School
Photographs, cut and rebuilt
PHOTOMONTAGE joins pieces of different photographs into one new picture. A person from one photograph can be placed into a totally different scene. The result can look believable. Or it can look deliberately, obviously impossible. Both are valid choices. Neither one is a mistake, only a decision.
The two things that give it away
Two things break a photomontage instantly. The first is SCALE. If a person is too big or too small for the scene, it looks wrong at once. The second is LIGHT. If the shadows fall the wrong way in different pieces, the eye catches it straight away. Both mistakes are easy to miss while working, and obvious once spotted.
Choosing believable or deliberately strange
Matching scale and light carefully makes a montage look like one real photograph. Breaking those rules on purpose does something else. A giant hand next to a tiny building looks surreal and dreamlike. Both are real artistic choices. Neither one is a mistake. Knowing the rule is what lets you break it on purpose.
A photograph of a person in a garden is cut out carefully around its edges. A beach photograph is chosen as the new background. Before gluing anything down, the sizes are checked first. Is the person roughly the size a real person would be on that beach? Next the light is checked. Which way do the shadows fall in the beach photo? The person's own shadow is drawn by hand, falling the exact same way. Only once both match is the person actually glued down. Scale and light, checked first, are what make the final montage genuinely convincing.