Photographic Montages

Project Brief

Create a high resolution photographic montage, 26 1/2 inches width by 35 1/2 inches height. First-year and out-of-major students were asked to create photographic montages using architectural photography or other related elements. Students were receiving their first foray into digital file management, selection techniques, layers, and layer masks while learning Adobe Photoshop. 

Learning Objectives

This assignment is based on the history of photographers experimenting with the medium’s physicality and creating a whole new image from previous work. Montages provide artists and students with an opportunity to go beyond the medium’s and software’s inherent instinct to represent reality exactly how it is. Students from the University of Minnesota, Duluth get a chance to re-interpret architectural environments. They take advantage of their design instincts to combine a multitude of photographs into another image in order to foster a fresh vision and idea. Students will pay attention to the perspective of viewpoint and the way forms can relate to each other from separate images.

Deliverables

Color print and high quality pdf at 26 1/2 inches width by 35 1/2 inches height

Reflections

This assignment was part of a class that was mixed with graphic design majors and non-majors. The amount of strong compositions (5 are shown here) from the entire class was pleasantly surprising, especially from the non-majors. Proper resolution and file management of large formatted documents was a learning curve for many students who had never worked before with high resolution and 'heavy' files