Kolaj Magazine #27 - December 2019
UNCOLLAGE IN PHOTOGRAPHY & FILMOGRAPHY
Forman, Muniz, Muybridge, Rejlander, Uelsmann
by Todd Bartel
Seamless-hidden composite imagery (Kolaj 25) and obviously-seamed composite imagery (Kolaj 26) are not limited by media type. In this article, I introduce two basic types of uncollages—revealed uncollages and concealed uncollages. Together, these opposing types expand the basic concept of uncollage to welcome works of art outside the field of painting. Photography and film, for example, are particularly well-suited media for creating uncollages. Within the first two decades after the first fixed photograph in the mid-1820s, artists had already discovered a need to uncollage, and both types were prevalent.
Concealed uncollages are exemplified by works of art that present as being (relatively) naturalistic and include works by artists such as Thomas Eakins, Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts, and Grandma Moses, among others. Revealed uncollages are exemplified by works of art that have surreal, super-naturalistic, symbolic characteristics or otherwise display an obvious method of abstraction and include works by artists such as Giuseppe Archimbaldo, Fra Angelico, Ginnie Gardiner, James Rosenquist, and Talin Megherian.
While these designations are generally useful, there are artists and particular works of art, however, that blend, to varying degrees, both types of uncollage in the same work. The paintings of Mark Tansey, for example, whose monochromatic tableaux sometimes reveal exposed appropriations, such as his 1992 Picasso and Brogue, and at other times are so thoroughly blended that detecting composite imagery is known only to the artist. That noted, the differences between revealed and concealed uncollages can be understood much in the same way as the differences that exist between hardware and software and the differences between analogue art and digital art.
Revealed uncollages present physically evident components. In the case of Vik Muniz's (1961- ) photography, for example, the artist usually starts with arrangements of objects, such as caviar, diamonds or thread to form a predetermined image using such material. In his photographic series work, Muniz often works with specific materials to point conceptually to the things he is creating. In his "Caviar Monster" series, for example, he arranged caviar into the likenesses of Dracula, Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. In his "Diamond Divas" series, his arrangements of precious cut gemstones resemble Romy Schneider, Catherine Deneuve, and Marlene Dietrich.
Photographs like Muniz's epitomize the revealed uncollage strategy because the components are visible and jointly establish an overall image. Particularly apropos of the term uncollage, Muniz's serial photography begins with the collection and arrangement of objects into semblances of things for each photograph taken, and then he disassembles the arrangements to make new configurations and new photographs using the same objects. When the series is complete, the disassembled, literally un-collaged, materials are stored or recycled.
By contrast, concealed uncollages mask the components used and are often rendered only conceptually evident. This type of uncollage can sometimes go undetected because the seamless collection of objects/imagery is not as readily recognizable as separate things at first glance. Early photographic examples of concealed uncollages include a great many photographs by the father of art photography Oscar Gustav Rejlander (1813-1875), which were made by using multiple negatives in an early photographic uncollage process called "combination printing".
French photographer Hippolyte Bayard (1801-1887) first suggested combination printing, but Rejlander would become the technique's first master practitioner. Rejlander trained as a painter in Rome and despite seeing the first comprehensive exhibition of photography ever mounted in 1852, was initially unimpressed by the medium. A year later, however, he realized a good use for photography: to document the sitters for his paintings, who often could not hold still for as long as Rejlander needed. In 1853, Rejlander turned to photography as a tool of reference for making paintings. After his initial experiments, he began to create photographs with an express purpose to emulate paintings. However, long exposures and the phenomenon of halation presented particular challenges for early photography, and Rejlander turned to Bayard's combination printing technique, which alleviated such problems. For example, taking two separate photographs, each with independent exposures, and then combining them in precise alignment—a photo with an exposure set to capture the tonality of a sky, and another photo with an exposure set to capture the tonality of the land—creates a seamless union of a single image. Rejlander's first uncollage is dated about 1855, but he greatly expanded the technique. His most ambitious combination print is The Two Ways of Life (1857), which boasts the use of 32 negatives in its most elaborate incarnation.
With many photography techniques established by the late 1800s, curiosity about capturing movement began to enter into everyday discourse. In 1872, Leland Stanford (the former governor of California) commissioned Eadweard James Muybridge (1830-1904) to make photographic studies of horse in motion in order to determine a then-popularly debated question—whether all four feet of a horse were off the ground at the same time during trotting and galloping. At Stanford's estate, Muybridge set up a bank of twelve cameras, dispersed along a track at fixed intervals, each with trip-strings attached to the cameras' shutters, which the galloping horse and rider activated during the gallop, which in turn triggered each camera's shutter.
Muybridge's subsequent photographs succeeded in answering the question and more. Each of the horse's feet touches the ground independently during a gallop and are all entirely off the ground at one point in the animal's stride--a set of facts rendered imperceptible to the human eye without the aid of photography. When seen a s individual static images, viewers perceive frozen moments of Muybridge's horse in a gallop. When viewed in rapid succession, the frozen moments accumulate into a semblance of motion.
Muybridge's early experiments with pictures and motion inspired him to invent what he called a zoopraxiscope to view the succession in repeated sequence—similar to a flipbook—and these experiments helped to inspire the moving picture industry. Films then, with their seeming indivisibility and an inherent semblance of fluid motion, are uncollages.
Throughout Rejlander's and Muybridge's photographic experiments, arguments ensued about unmanipulated photography (purist photography) versus manipulated photography (composed or pictorial photography), and that debate existed in both scientific circles and the general public alike. Rejlander's concealed uncollages were celebrated for their painterly qualities and the naturalism captured in his sitters' facial expressions. They were deemed extraordinary because most studio photography at that time mandated that sitters sat for long exposures and the resulting photographs were generally devoid of the nuances of human emotion. His magnum opus, however, was criticized as being too unnatural. Indeed, the ambitious composite, The Two Ways of Life, exudes a "Photoshop-like" quality that oddly compresses the spaces between combined images, rendering a perceptible shimmer in the overall image.
Photography's credibility stems from photographs capture momentary reality with a dependable degree of fidelity, but of course, in an age of mechanical reproduction, to borrow Walter Benjamin's poignant phrase, artists can also alter photographic truth through the techniques of uncollage. In addition to a longstanding bias against photography as not being the stuff of fine art, two attitudes about making photographs prevailed between photography's inception through to the 1990s, which persist, but are now becoming obsolete due to the digital revolution: "purist" photographers do not alter their images; "pictorialist" photographers readily alter their images as needed. Since the first fixed photograph by Nicéphore Niépce in the mid-1820s, the evolution of photography has moved from still photographs to moving pictures to xerography to digital imaging and, now, to smartphone apps, to name a few key areas of creative exploration.
In the early 1960s, decades before the advent of Photoshop, Jerry Uelsmann (1934- ) perfected a technique for seamless combination printing which in some of his work presents seeming proof of the impossible (seamlessly concealed), while other of his works present idealized or metaphorized imagery not hindered by the laws of reality (seamlessly revealed). Uelsmann typically combines several enlargers and negatives along with the techniques of burning and dodging to form a single composite photograph. His 1976 untitled [mansion with water reflecting trees & floating suit jacket], for example, looks real enough, but the depicted architectural structure brandishes an implausible reflection: a tell-tale uncollaged reflection of trees. A more perplexing image, for its convincing corruption of reality, is his 1991 untitled [water as the sky with a floating rock]. In untitled 1991, Uelsmann's pictorialist depiction of two diametrically positioned reflections of water, still rippling from a rising/descending boulder, reverberate in the sky overhead and the gravity-based lake below. The photograph raises a surreal conundrum; from which direction did the rock emanate? What confuses and delights the mind is Uelsmann's combination of purism and pictorialism—delicious confusion. We want to believe the fidelity of Uelsmann's imagery, but we know they are works of uncollage, and this tension clings sweetly to the mind in a way that only collage and juxtaposition can provide.
Fran Forman (1945- ) began creating digital art in 1992, two years after the public appearance of Photoshop and has been using the software ever since. She is known for two distinct ways in which she works with photography and computer-based imagery. In the early 2000s, her work typically combined saturated pictorial superimpositions of texture, antigravity hoverings of bodies and objects, reflections and surreal atmospheres. To assemble these works, Forman created an extensive image library that included photographs and scans of tintypes and daguerreotypes, damaged photographs, family albums, old paper and books, distressed walls and wood any surface that could be added and layered in Photoshop to create her other-worldly imagery. A representative revealed uncollage from this period is Journey (2006). Forman's recent approach to image making is almost exclusively created using her photography and her approach in handling composite imagery is more about concealed joinery and the blending of selected images. She often takes pictures of pictures in museums as well as commissioning models for all of her imagery. It is as if in her new work, Forman uses photography to generate her own found photos. Her 2018 Two Wimples is a convincing scene that never took place at a single moment in time and space. Forman sees herself more as a choreographer or film director than a digital artist, a term she dislikes. In her own words, Forman self-identifies as "a painter who uses digitally captured photography", which poetically brings us full circle.
Painters once reached for photography to help them understand how to paint form with greater accuracy and some painters resorted to using composite photos to develop more convincing illusions with paint. Forman is an uncollage artist who uses photographs to establish imagery that captures the feeling of paintings, and she works with computers, scanners, digital cameras and dozens of layers in Photoshop to achieve her aspirations. Forman, however, does not want to be limited by the term digital art as she is more interested in the fusion of creative methods, which is at the heart of uncollage.
Today, the public has grown used to seeing seamless composite versions of reality that can include monsters, extinct animals, interstellar space travel, superheroes and sorcerers with extraordinary powers—and these types of films proliferate every cinema. One of the most stunning examples of early Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) is the 1993 film Jurassic Park, which for the first time allowed viewers the truest possible visualization of the fossil record come to life. That moment in time was as monumental as the Wright Brothers' Kitty Hawk Flight and Neil Armstrong's "small step for Man." We typically do not think about collage or collage processes when we are peering at such imagery, but collage is there and is thoroughly responsible for what we see. Uncollages combine aspects of human experience that are typically not present in traditional attitudes toward photography, film or painting. Uncollages show us something about ourselves that is not necessarily visible in the world without concealed or revealed juxtaposing.
Todd Bartel is a collage-based artist. His work assumes assembled forms of painting, drawing and sculpture that examine the roles of landscape and nature in contemporary culture. Since 2002, Bartel has taught drawing, painting, sculpture, installation art and conceptual ort at the Cambridge School of Weston, Weston, Massachusetts. He is the founder and the Director of the Cambridge School's Thompson Gallery, a teaching gallery dedicated thematic inquiry, and "IS" (Installation Space), a proposal-based installation gallery. Bartel holds a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in pointing from Carnegie Mellon University. Bartel's Kolaj Magazine Artist Directory page has more information, as well as his website, www.toddbarteLcom