Thursday, October 02, 2003

Montage / Collage

The words montage and collage seem to be used frequently to describe the same thing. I certainly find myself using the terms interchangeably. The definitions found on dictionary.com are thus:

Collage: An artistic composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface, often with unifying lines and color.

Montage: A single pictorial composition made by juxtaposing or superimposing many pictures or designs.

It seems that montage is more often applied to 'superimposing', whereas collage seems to apply to 'pasting over'.

furthermore...

In the days before digital technology and Photoshop composing images from different sources was done in a variety of ways. The achieve photographic montage either multiple exposures could be made on the negative in the camera or by exposing different negatives to sensitive paper in the darkroom. This image by El Lissitsky from 1924 shows this photographic technique very well. Creating collage on paper could be achieved by combining images by cutting and glueing down onto a background or 'substrate'. With this techniques comes a much more 'hard edge' effect. Unless components are printed on transparent material like tracing paper, soft, 'see-through' effects are hard to achieve. This photomontage by Hannah Hoch from 1920 shows this technique. The word montage is often applied to artefacts that are 'constructed'. Rather than merely combining flat images, actual objects can be used. Of course, this type of montage actually becomes a three-dimensional object. More often, though, the montage is created with very little projected dimension. This construction by Joseph Cornell from 1940 uses a variety of objects and printed material. We can look to techniques of printmaking to see more sophistication. In particular, with photographic screenprinting transparent inks can be a very effective way to achieve 'blending'.

This screen print by Robert Rauschenberg in 1964 shows photographic images combined with brush strokes to achieve transparency. The digital techniques that we use with Photoshop seem to have their roots in photography rather than 'construction'. However, we could use a combination of techniques such as; construct something and photograph or scan it into a computer, then further manipulate it. Or even; print digital images, cut them up and make 'traditional' collages, and then, scan them back into the computer for further manipulation.