Photomontage - Film Photography

    Photomontage is a technique of making an image composed of two or more pictures into one. It involves a series of methods that a photographer may use in the dark room and developing process. It may be used to create images with a political message, communicate the artist's message, or create a visual illusion like a ghost portrait. Personal use sees it being used to create memorial portraits, particularly in a historical context. Memorial portraits would be used to commemorate a loved one who had passed in a favorable context. Ghost Portraits or Spirit photographs allowed living individuals to have pictures with their loved ones who were no longer alive. Ghost images and illusion were also popular in the Victorian era, to create playful and spooky images.

Political example above left: John Heartfield- Adolf the superman, 1932. https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/photomontage-art

Memorial Portrait example above middle: Hancock, Memorial Portrait, c.1890, Albumen print mounted on card with photogram elements.

Ghost Portrait example above right: William H. Mumler, Spirit photographs, c. 1870, Albumen prints

 A variety of techniques can be used to create photo montages in the dark room including, stacking the negatives one on top of another in the enlarger, which requires an increase in exposure time and will result in both images being visible on the print. Dodge and burning means you create a mask out of a light-proof material, and typically do two exposures, which means your mask consists of at two parts. If you are adding more than one image to the original one, then you need more masks and more exposures. In each exposure, you cover all parts on the photo paper that you don’t want that negative to print on. Difficulty may arise when lining up the photo paper for each exposure as you can not yet see where the image was exposed from the last one because you do not develop the paper until all the exposures have been completed. When dodge and burning if you choose to feather or lift your mask in line with the paper and the image you want to print you will create blurred lines making it unclear where one image ends and the other begins, if you leave the mask in place then you will end up with clean sharp lines defining your images. Finally, you can simply cut and glue prints of the separate images together, photograph, and print that, which is what I found to be the simplest option.