(c) Colonel Mouser by Jo Phillips
Recently I entered an image on Photocrowd for a contest entitled ‘Composite Images With Cats’. The image comprised of my Maine Coon and a photograph I took of a gentleman at Powis Castle. I combined the two images and then had a further thought that it might be fun to include some mice. The final image is called ‘Colonel Mouser’ the viewer can decide on his determination and effectiveness at catching the mice, maybe the image is a symbol of unity and peace after all.
This project led me on to look at the history and development of composite photographic images.
Compositing
The process or technique of combining of visual elements from separate sources into single images, often to create the illusion that all those elements are parts of the same scene. Digital compositing techniques, go back as far as the films of Georges Méliès in the late 19th century.
Sideline Discovery:
People usually associate the birth of photography with Louis Daguerre’s Daguerreotype. His process became the first widespread method of photography after France revealed it to the world on August 19, 1839. But there were actually multiple inventors of photography, and one of them was an amateur French tinkerer named Hippolyte Bayard. Even before Daguerre’s process was revealed, Bayard had achieved photographic results. However, François Arago, the chair of the French Academy of Sciences, overlooked Bayard’s accomplishment and elevated Daguerre’s instead. And as a protest to this perceived injustice, Bayard took a self-portrait depicting himself as an unidentified man in the Paris Morgue who took his own life. This image is not only the first staged photo, it’s also an early example of photography depicting something non-literal and symbolic, laying the groundwork for the medium to be used as a form of creative expression.
Bayard’s photographs at the French Society of Photography
Reading:
Composite Photographs, 19th and early 20th Century
Photo Manipulation Throughout History: A Timeline
Composite Photography in Victorian Times
A Brief Visual History of Composite Portraiture in Photography.
Building a Story Through Composite Photography
(c) The Sorcerer by Jo Phillips
