Montage: Family History: Ideas and Proposal

FAMILY HISTORY is to be my theme. This post is to be read in conjunction with the one entitled Montage: Early Stages and Planning. I will deal with the conceptual/theme here, and the technical in the other post. As is often the case, there will be some overlap in places.

Background (or: why?)

The work I have done so far has encompassed different parts of British working life (car boots, Broughton House, Launderettes, my street photographs). Tapping into this, I am also interested in family life, especially as I feel its effects nearly every day of my life. I have suffered from Anxiety and Depression all of my adult life, which has meant I have looked into many different theories as to its genesis. Some have been futile, but others have added a richness to how I come to understand my upbringing and the characters involved. The word 'characters' itself is important here, for I am interested in the narrative of people's lives, and how these can be represented in literature and the visual arts. I was only thinking the other day about how the death of Margaret Thatcher and the retirement of Alex Ferguson seem to represent an ending of something that has been a part of the backdrop to my own life in one way or another, albeit on the outskirts of day-to-day life itself.

As with most families, things have happened within mine over the last few years that have been painful, and in many respects they have happened within quick succession, allowing very little time to take stock and process. As is the British way, such things are not openly discussed in any great detail, choosing instead to "just get on with it" and do what has to be done. So I suppose the montage I will create is my way of expressing and interpreting the way I feel about my family. I think the art of photo montage is such a suitable way of carrying out this task, especially in the age of Photoshop, where layers can be used to represent the layers of memory in one's life and family history.

The Process/themes

On Mother's Day a few months ago, I urged my lovely mother to get some old pictures out so I could have a look at them and see what I could make of them in a piece of art. There were a lot of them. Crikey. All from different eras and epochs- containing a whole host of different characters- sadly a lot now deceased. It was also interesting to see the different types and negative, media and formats used over the years. It would be an interesting piece of research to find out exactly what film (even camera) was used to shoot my parents' wedding for instance.

Whilst looking through all these gems from the past, I noticed certain themes developing in my head: key relationships between family members, shared interests etc. For instance I noticed how all of my immediately family have been involved with the scouting movement in some time in their childhood/adolescence, so this made me think of how I could link these in visual form.

Father and son relationships will be of paramount importance in the creative process. I have always marvelled at the way this topic is representing in the arts as one of difficulty, expectation and poor communication. I feel I can explore this in my montage due to the fact I have pictures of my and my father from my childhood, as well as those of his father too.

Following on from these relationships, work was something that was always stressed as being important in our family, and it is interesting looking back (now both my parents are retired) at the part this played in their lives and the people they were as a result. I find it difficult to detach my father from the hard-working scaffolder he was: the feelings I felt as he arrived home from work every day- eating his tea with a pint of Stonehouse cider, off the old green tray that once belonged to my maternal grandmother. I wrote a poem in 2010 about my father's inability to switch-off from work and the damage I felt it had caused me. It might be an idea to dig this out of my creative writing file and layer the original over a scene of  my father working. I find the written word in montage even more appealing than that of the typed word.

There are also some deeper- somewhat darker- issues that I am going to tackle here. I have a picture of my late brother who sadly passed away a ten years before I was born. I see this as a fundamental and inescapable part of my family history, making up part of my own legacy. I often wonder about the effects this has had on the two people that would later bring me into the world: would they have been different had their first-born lived? I think art is a perfect place to explore some of these unanswered questions of one's past (or one's parents' past).

I aim to use the tools available to me in Photoshop to fill in these blanks, so to speak. I like the fact that I will start with a blank canvas, and use these snapshots from decades ago, to ultimately "build-up" and create a new image that I can look at for years to come. After all, what is art if not a means of rewriting what is? And what is photography if not to see things in different ways?

Montage: Suck it and See

This is a continuation of the Early Stages & Planning post. In that post I discussed some of the key things to be mindful of before beginning a project like this, such as resolution, image quality ways of scanning and preparing an image for work inclusion in a piece. Here- as the title suggests- I will pretty much be "journalling" the things I put into practice as I go along and commenting what I feel works, what I feel doesn't, and how things can be improved. Here goes!

This is a little test to get me into it. As you can see, I have layered 3 other JPEG images over the original: the passport cover that I have fitted onto my mother's skirt, reducing the opacity and erasing the excess; the "United Kingdom" part of my passport onto my fathers arm, and a baby picture of myself layered onto his face. For all of these I have used a Curves layer with a Clipping Mask. This was especially important for the baby picture, for I wanted it to fully resemble the tones of the original picture. If there's something to take from this early effort, its that it reminds me of an old punk album cover (The Sex Pistols), and how the movement often relied upon the reappropriation of the past (more on this below).

Another simple manipulation here. I have merely boosted the colour with a Levels layer, then layered the crest from the front of the passport over my face, before adjusting this to the appropriate hue with a Curves layer with a Clipping Mask attached (RGB). Again this reminds me of the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen cover.

Jamie Reid's album artwork made from paper cut outs in the style of a ransom note  (1)

In the next post I aim to start my montage proper, using a fresh canvas.

  

Montage: Early Stages and Planning

I think the first thing I knew I had to consider was what resolution I was going to scan at. I had a quick read of the booklet given to us by David Gee (tutor and Photoshop extraordinaire), but decided that- since I had already made a pretty good job of some collages last year (see previous post)- I didn't really need to know all that was detailed. I really just wanted to get on with the scanning and messing around (experimenting in Photoshop). I think a project like this is more about having fun than understanding the technical side. That being said, the first thing I did was to scan an old photo of my parents twice (one at 300dpi and one at 600dpi) to give me an idea of the the pros and cons of each one. I did this because the 300dpi didn't look too clever on screen when I first opened it. However, the 600dpi one looked even worse, possibly because (using Dave's notes) "the image resolution [was] set at a value near or above the printer's [HP Photosmart C470] resolution". Below is an image of my mother and father "back in the day" scanned at different resolutions.

Scanned at 300dpi

scanned at 75dpi (for some reason my scanner doesn't have a 72). Note how faded it looks compared with the one scanned at 300dpi.

It is also important to know whether an image will work best scanned as colour, greyscale or black and white. Before looking into this, I foolishly thought B&W would be similar to greyscale, but apparently not. Black and White does exactly what it says on the tin, whereas greyscale contains all the tones in between the two: "all artwork falls into two basic categories -- black-and-white line art and continuous-tone images"  (1). Grayscale falls into the second bracket. Below is an image (again of my mother and father in their halcyon days) scanned using greyscale, black and white and colour.

Colour pays heed to the subtleties of the image, representing the true feel of the photograph. Any changes can then be made in Photoshop. I plan n scanning everything as a colour image.

Greyscale looks faded by comparison.

Black and White just renders the photo unworkable. It is akin to the Hard Mix blend mode of layers in Photoshop (below).

Hard Mix blend of the greyscale image

Hard Mix blend of the colour version.

The next step was to follow the tutorial on "touching-up" that was presented to us by Dave at a later date. This is basically the kind of stuff you see advertised in the shop windows of photographers and printers ["we restore old photographs here" etc.]. I don't think I will retouch all the photos I use in my piece (I want some to retain their authenticity of the time), but below is a retouching of the first image I showed. I've also added a Levels layer, darkening both the blacks and midtones for extra "punch".

Note how I have completely removed the wear to the right of the image. And looks so much better once I played with the levels.

Additional to these photos from yesteryear, I knew from my collage/montage last year that text works really well because key words from the text can be associated with certain images. It was just as well- whilst rummaging through my family's old archives- I also stumbled across an old hymn sheet and other typed sheets. Here I plan to enlarge the text in Photoshop by cropping, and layering over an image. This will then allow me to alter the opacity, fill and blend modes. As you can imagine, most of these documents are stained and/or have been written on by either myself as a child or another child in our family at the time. This makes them perfect for use as textures, much like the session dedicated to transforming portraits into composite images.

The printed word works very well in the montage, as certain words can be linked to relevant images.

The idea of the printed word used to strengthen the images used in a my montage gave me another idea: I could scan my passport (now expired) to create the theme of identity, which links inextricably with family. I already have countless amounts of pictures of me at various stages of my life, so I could use these (memories) to link with the more impersonal document of the passport, with its expressionless smile. The burgundy cover of the passport itself could also be used as a texture, or else merged with the main part.

Montage for me is not just about images, but also typeface: there's no mistaking the strict, regimental font of the passport, made more so when juxtaposed with memories from the past.
The text looks faded here, but with a Levels layer, this can soon be made more bold and workable.

Old, worn, tatty, the outside jacket of the passport might make a good texture, or at least blended something at some point.

Just as I considered the ways text can be linked to images, I think I also need to consider the colours I use when constructing a piece of work such as this. To say Photoshop has a lot of potential would be understatement of the year, and it is very much the more sophisticated relative of an artist's palette. An artist wouldn't combine colours that didn't go together whilst painting a masterpiece, and it is no different when using a digital program such as Photoshop. I have been looking at the types of colours involved in some of the old photos I have, so now I need to find ways of keeping things within the same colour gamut. I have a found a good way of doing this is to create a Curves adjustment layer with a Clipping Mask attached, so that I can then adjust the Red, Green and Blue curves separately. The clipping mask only effects the layer below, which in this case would be a new image layered over the original/main image.

I think at this stage I pretty much have a footing on what I aim to do. From here-on in, it will pretty much be a case of "suck it and see". I will be trying things and posting the various stages on here just to keep a breast of things, whether they work or not (and why).

1) http://www.creativepro.com/article/scanning-101-setting-the-right-resolution

Montage: Early/Small Examples & Examples from the past.

Before starting the montage unit proper, I thought I would put on my early examples of image manipulation; mainly involving the basic cutting and sizing techniques introduced to us by David Gee.

This was technically for the advertisement session we had with Richard. I crumpled my North Face jacket, applied my x2 close-up filter to my 18-55mm lens, and- with use of flash in TTL mode, I focussed on the NF logo and shot the image. I then opened in Photoshop, adjusted the Levels, to boost contrast and darks and added the North Face logo from the web. I also sourced a picture of a snowy mountain from the web and used Free Transform to alter its size and make sure it fit well into one of the folds of my jacket. Then I merely "played" with the opacity of this layer to ensure it wasn't too bold that it would distract the viewer from the "meat and drink of the adertisement, namely the embroidered logo on my coat and catchline on the bottom. For the catchline itself I used my skills in linking clever wordplay to images: I simply linked the fact I'd reduced the opacity of the moutain layer to the assumption/boast that the sense of adventure is implicit witin the brand name. Ironically, North Face is one of those brands that is hardly ever used for what it is supposedly made for.   



Well you didn't think I could embrace this important part of the course without involving my beloved Action Man did it? The above is also an advertisement; this time for the British Army. The image (Action Man "doing press-ups") was shot in the studio using a single soft box a la most product photography. I then opened it in Camera RAW to boost Contrast, Darks and Vibrancy before opening it in the main CS6 to crop to size and adjust Levels as I did with my North Face advert. The camourflage background was sourced from the web. I layered this over the cropped image, then used the Eraser tool on the white layer mask to erase all the parts of the background that had gone over AM. I then sourced the Army logo and layered and resizing it.

                       

                   

       

       

The above images were a lot simpler to make. It was pretty much a case of fitting AM's face into the gaps provided by David's images, creating a new Curves layer (with a Clipping Mask so the changed wouldn't effect the whole image) and adjusting the RGB colour levels to make the colour of AM's skin the same as the animated image. For the Kitchener one (right), I had to cut AM's face into two parts to make sure his face was proportionate between the different sides of his face. I tried the whole face initially, but the Free Transform part of the process stretched his face too much out of proportion.

Past Examples of Montage

For the Level Two City and Guilds course a year ago I produced the images below. These also appeared in an exhibition I had in Hulme back in November. 

 The last (one directly above) was my first attempt at this type of thing, and involves creating a new canvas the same size (in pixels) of one of my standard images of the Mancunian Way, then layering other pictures from on top of it and changing the blend modes. For instance, the image of the Old Cock pub in Hulme (centre right) used the blend mode Hard Mix, giving a very intense negative-like feel. The text you can see on this is a old ASDA till receipt I'd scanned. I was very enthusiastic about the idea of incorporating text into this type of thing. I did the same in the middle one, only this one is using my own written notes on what I did in Photoshop to create it in the first place. Overall, all of the above pieces are created using Layers, Masks (inc. clipping), Eraser tool and blend modes. I hope to use all of these in my montage for Unit 27.