For this exercise I learned and used the basic techniques of using layers in Adobe Photoshop: creation, duplication, blending and the tools for opacity, transparency and fade and the partial recovery of the background layer.
For the post about an artist's work, I chose Hannah Hoch and her collages/photomontages.
"A painter can express whatever he wants with fruits or flowers and even with clouds. You already know, my main ambition is to become the St. Francis of still life".
Edouard Manet
Edouard Manet considered still life to be the "touchstone of the painter". Still life had a period of great popularity in the 1860s.
However, representing inanimate objects with great precision and skill was not considered "art" by many critics.
In fact, it was claimed that the artists who dedicated their work to still life were skilled but not talented, specialists in flowers, tables set and "things" of various kinds, which, if they had dedicated themselves to something else, would have taken away value from what they painted.
There were many great painters, of Spanish, Dutch, Italian, French, English nationality who dedicated themselves to still life, producing admirable and very famous works.
For my exercise, I chose as a reference a work belonging to an even more specific pictorial section of Edouard Manet: the watercolours that decorated the letters, often sent to friends.
In the d'Orsay Museum, there are about twenty letters from Manet, including the letter to Isabelle Lemonier, dated 1880.
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Edouard Manet, letter to Isabelle Lemonier, 1880,
Musèe d'Orsay, Paris, France |
To recreate Manet's style in photographic format, I looked for a document that had a writing style of other times and I found a letter from my grandfather from 1930. To this letter, I added a flower of "ancient" colours. I then thought that the lighting shouldn't be artificial, so I used natural light from a large window on a cloudy afternoon.
I wanted to give this composition, the colours and the image a sense of ancient and I think I have achieved the result. It wasn't that easy and I believe that still life in photography requires special skills not only in composition but also in lighting and shooting techniques.
While waiting for Amazon to deliver Lisa Barnard's book to me, I reflected on the found images and why, from Hannah Hoch to Peter Kennard, from John Hartfield to Banksy, many of the artists who have dedicated themselves to photomontage have done so for political reasons.
I did a google search with keywords in Italian "photomontage" and "politics" and I found hundreds of sites and thousands of political satire images.
I also found sites where it is possible, with great ease and without any technical knowledge, to create political photomontages at the limit of visual perfection.
From this point of view Italy is certainly no different from the UK: only the subjects change, which are certainly not popular in the UK as, conversely, the British political subjects are not so popular in Italy. I would say that, in this period, the most famous British politician in Italy is Boris Johnson's hair.
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| Berlusconi convict in place of Steve Mcqueen |
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Another politician, Brunetta, famous for being very short
in stature with a young Robin Williams
Side note: in the famous greeting "Nano Nano" by the alien Mork (Robin Williams), the word "Nano" in Italian means dwarf. |
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Comedian Beppe Grillo, entered politics and
accused of behaving like Moses |
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| Politician Mara Carfagna |
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| Politician Matteo Renzi |
Returning to why the photomontage is so useful to political satire, I think that the image constructed in this way is functional to the political language and political agenda of everyone.
I would also like to mention an English artist, Banksy, very famous in recent years, who built his work on the basis of the use of montage and stencil technique, recalling his works to quotes of events that are not necessarily British. In his own way, some of his works can also be defined as collages of other well-known images or stereotypes.
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| Banksy, Applause, 2006 |
In particular, in the age of the internet and the usability of any image of any known person, it is very easy for anyone to build satirical or even more aggressive images from a political point of view.
Social aggregation products like Whatsapp are perfect for circulating millions of satirical images and videos, to the point that, at least for me, it is more complicated than usual to be creative and build new and effective points of view.
“Enhanced? Or fake? Today the very idea of photographic veracity is being radically challenged by the technology of digital image manipulation and synthesis: photographs can be altered at will in ways that are virtually undetectable, and photorealistic synthesized images are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from actual photographs.”
William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye
