14″x11″; gelatin silver print; 1976
Courtesy of the artist.
FROM KOLAJ 27
Uncollage in the work of Jerry Uelsmann, Fran Forman, Vik Muniz, Eadweard James Muybridge, and Oscar Gustav Rejlander.
For the first time in the magazine’s history, we are featuring a photomontage on the cover: Untitled (water as the sky with a floating rock) by Jerry Uelsmann. In the third installment of a series of articles about uncollage, Todd Bartel investigates uncollage in photography and film and discusses the work of Uelsmann, Fran Forman, Vik Muniz, Eadweard James Muybridge, and Oscar Gustav Rejlander.
“Photography and film 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,” writes Bartel. “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.”
This article appeared in KOLAJ #27. To see the entire issue, SUBSCRIBE to Kolaj Magazine or Get a Copy of the Issue.
16″x30″; combination print with 32 negatives; 1857
Courtesy of The Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum, Bradford, United Kingdom
“Photography’s credibility stems from the presumption that 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.”
To see the entire issue, SUBSCRIBE to Kolaj Magazine or Get a Copy of the Issue.
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 art 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 painting from Carnegie Mellon University. Bartel’s Kolaj Magazine Artist Directory page has more information, as well as his website, www.toddbartel.com.