Jess Ferguson: Creating the Photomontage

My idea for this project that I chose to pursue was the idea that multiple aspects of life could be shown in a series of images. For this I began by taking a series of photographs of one of my friends walking in Clayton campus, in a place where there was lots of blank wall space and few trees. This was so I could have a series of images of the same girl walking, with her image fading behind her, refereeing to the quote that “life is a series of images that change as they repeat themselves”, and also look at changing popular culture by showing a chronological view of the change of the Coca-Cola advertising from the 1950s to the present day. I chose Coke because it is a well recognised popular product, where the advertising styles have started to go back to the past, with glass bottles etc especially in the most recent diet coke ad campaign, “The Celebration of the Little Black Dress”.
The first task was to cut the girl out from her surroundings so she could be easily manipulated separately from her background. Because the images were quite dark, because of the bad weather during that week, it was hard to distinguish the girl from the background. To combat this I altered the brightness and sometimes the contrast to make it easier. I also had to move and change the scale of some of the pictures of the girl to create more even gaps between each picture.

I collected a series of advertising posters and images from coke, to use posters to stick on the walls. I tried to do this in a circular fashion from oldest on the side of the Mensies Building to most recent with the little black dress. For this I reduces the transparencies of the posters so it was easier to line up the posters with the bricks and other parts of the buildings behind them.

One of the major problems with the photomontage was that, despite my best efforts, there were still trees obstructing the posters, meaning I had to erase the gaps between the leaves for the poster to be visible. Because of the dark photograph and the high level of detail in the trees, this was incredibly difficult.

This was eventually covered by slightly blurring the trees and burning shadows into the posters. I also changed the lightness and saturation of the pictures to make them fit with the darker picture and according to whether they were in shadow or not to look as though they belonged in the photo. I also slightly increased the yellow in the oldest poster because that would be exposed to UV damage during sunnier weather.

Next I had to erase another person in the photographs behind the girl. This was because when I was taking the photographs, the girl was pausing and changing pace according to how fast my camera was taking the pictures, therefore I did not have sufficient photographs to do the same to the second girl as I did to the first. To eraser her, I pasted the background of a later picture over her. This was easily achieved as I was using a tripod for this series of photographs.