Digital Montage - Research

Whilst trawling the net looking for inspiration for my Digital Montage I came across the work of Peter Kennard @at_earth on twitter. Following the death of Maggie Thatcher he produced the following montages

 

 

 

 

This gave me inspiration to work on a Thatcher Montage in relation to Section 28.

 

Digital Montage - Research - Ralph Ueltzhoeffer

In 2002 Ralph Ueltzhoeffer creates the first biographical-portrait and released them via Internet (2005). The popularity of text portraits got most fame by the death of Michael Jackson, thereupon the US software company Adobe developed a plugin for Photoshop CS. Ueltzhoeffer's artistic research is dedicated to the relationship of visual and written information in the digital sphere and their relevance for the beliefs one produces from these data. His search for new forms synchronizing visual and written information reacts and reflects on the internet as an open and central source of information in times of globalization and digitalization of data.

Although not digital montage per se, i wanted to create as part of my montage a portrait Ueltzhoeffer style using a portrait of Margeret Thatcher and the text of section 28 legislation from wikipedia.

Some of his work:-

Digital Montage - Margaret Thatcher Section 28

My Montage is based on Section 28 legislation that Maggie Thatcher brought out to stop the teaching or mention of homosexuality in schools This is my personal response to a political issue. For the montage I took a portrait off the internet of Maggie courtesy of Martintideswell.com. I took the wikipedia entry for Section 28 copy and pasted it to a word document and changed the font size and style and converted the text to red. I changed the portrait to black and white in photoshop and applied a mask to bring back the colour of the flag. I opened a text layer and copied the text and aligned it over her face. I scanned 4 newspaper cuttings on a flatbed scanner and copy and pasted on to the side of the portrait.

Alternative images based on the above with an added image of the Gay Rainbow flag that was then manipulated in blending mode:-