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PHOTOMONTAGE AND COLLAGE
Photomontage is created when an original composite im-
age is photographed to produce a seamless unifi ed effect
in order to turn out duplicate photographic copies. Mon-
tage is from the French “monter,” meaning to mount. It is
a hand process used to alter camera-derived images and
introduce subjectiveness into a photograph. Generally,
existing photographs are cut apart and selected portions
are glued onto a fl at surface and rephotographed. The
widespread use of photocollage had its start in early
photo albums before the days of mass production. In
these personal albums, photographs and fl owers were
pasted onto pages and later hand painted or sketched
on by the album’s creator. Photomontage on the other
hand, was a thing people in mourning created to ease
their grieving. The photomontages usually consisted of
cartes-de-visite and montaged portraits on to elaborate
photographic backgrounds and typically included a
photograph of a picture frame on cabinet. From these
creations came the development of montaged multi-view
panels which were then re-photographed and sold as
cartes-de-visite, thus creating the market.
In 1863 André Disdéri applied for a French patent
for his “carte mosaïque” (mosaic carte). The precedent
was the composite images of celebrities and eminent
personalities that were commonly circulated by means
of the printing press. Disdéri’s mosaic cartes, featuring
thematic portrait composites of actors, dancers, gener-
als, the French royal family, and social groups received
enthusiastic public support. Each mosaic carte could be
comprised of twenty to one thousand faces. They served
as advertising (studio address appearing on either the
front or back of the carte) and people could come to his
“Palace of Photography” and also buy a carte of their
favorite personality or have one of their own made by
the man who photographed everyone from Napoleon
III to the Pope. The introduction of the cabinet style
photograph starting in the 1860s offered the mass-
market a larger image area that the carte-de-visite and
encouraged more photographers to experiment with
combining images.
As in combination printing, montage was devised to
overcome aesthetic and technical limitations. The con-
cept of removing a photograph from its original context
and placing it into a new one has had profound effects
on the viewer’s willingness to accept as “real” visual
information supplied by the photograph. The mosaic
broke the rules about representing perspective, point
of view, space, and time, and yet the public willingly
accepted these radical changes as long as they remained
photographically anchored. The term, photomontage,
was not introduced until after World War I by the Ger-
man Dadaists.
Collage (from the French coller, to glue or paste) is
the practice of cutting and pasting together of two- and/
or three-dimensional materials, including lace and dried
fl owers and plants, to form a new visual composition. In
creating a collage no effort is made to conceal that the
result has been assembled and is not a seamless image.
Collage can be seem in Victorian family albums that
incorporated the hobbies of appliqué print and water-
color that allowed people, almost exclusively women, to
privately alter and interpret photographic images.
Another form of collage involves bringing together
disparate images to form a new meaning. During the
American Civil War, the United States Post Offi ce Dead
Letter Offi ce assembled groups of photographs in a grid
fashion and displayed them in hopes that someone would
recognize a face and claim the photograph. This practical
strategy of disseminating would eventually be adopted
into artistic and scientifi c photographic practice.
Lady Filmer (1840–1903) was an aristocratic amateur
who made early collages that combined carte-de-visite
portraits with watercolor designs of butterfl ies and fl oral
arrangements. These pieces, with their occasional sexual
allusions, disclose a pre-Freudian spirit of unconscious
association, a component of mental life not subject to
recall at will, which required a new form of expression
because the language for such a discussion had yet to
be invented. Since such work was done for personal
reasons and was not publicly exhibited or written about,
it appears that there was no nomenclature to discuss
what was being done. This sort of individual interaction
with photographs did allow people with some artistic
skill to reorient images in time, space, and meaning.
Collage positioned photography to investigate free
association, to use cut and paste methods to examine
dreams and enable the unconscious, repressed residue
of socially unacceptable desires and experiences to be
consciously presented. The technique is the forerunner
of surrealistic practices and images developed in the
twentieth century.
Hand-coloring was widely practiced from photog-
raphy’s earliest days of to overcome its initial inability
to record color. For an extra fee, the operator made
notes about the color of the sitter’s clothes, eyes, and
hair. Color was hand-applied, based on these notations,
directly on the fi nished image, which covered every
process including daguerreotypes, paper prints, and
tintypes. By 1843 John Plumb, Jr. was offering “color”
portraits in his chain of studios by electroplating por-
tions of the fi nished daguerreotype.
Alfred H. Wall promoted the practice in his Manual
of Artistic Colouring as Applied to Photographs (1861).
Wall, a former miniature and portrait painter, said that
painting over a photograph was no more unacceptable
than painters such as Leonardo and Titian painting
over the abbozzo. Wall complained that artists repudi-
ated hand-colored photographs because they were not
paintings and that photographers rejected them because