Critical use of the Overlay

There are two types of collages based upon the following; seamless and cut’ n’ paste. One is more obvious than the other. Seamless is where every attempt is made to hide the joins and make it a convincing reality. Cut’ n’ Paste is exactly the way it sounds these collages reveal torn edges, shadows, glue and tape, they foreground the mechanism of their own construction.

Dada is mostly associated with establishing an  Anti-Art or incorporate a political aspect. One known Dada artist is John Heartfield who made a piece known as, “Through Light to Night 1933.” A website with Dada images can be found at Sites.google.com.

Lomography came about from cheap cameras with cheap engineered lenses. They amplify the colours and smear the focus. Creating a image that leads you to believe you were there. An example can be found on Flickr under the title, “Low down in the souks.” For a good tutorial of Lamography refer to the following Photoshop tutorial - PhotoshopTutorials.ws.

Francis Galton perfected the art of Photo Composites where a series of images of the same subject are blended together, in which photographs of different subjects were combined, through repeated limited exposure, to produce a single blended image.  Galton perfected the technical details of the method by repeated trial-and-error over many years, using apparatus of his own design.

He was especially interested in the use of these composites to test if there was a recognizable criminal type revealed by them, but his experiments in this direction proved that, within the range of data available to him, no such type revealed itself. The portraits of criminals tended to blend away into normality.

See the below composites of convicted criminals. 

Idris Khan used images taken by Every Berndt and Hillder Becher of gas sperhical cylinders and blended these together into a composite. This created a composite of what most gas tanks that are spherical look like at a gas station.

Christian Staebler invented the art of scanographie which is taking an object and placing on a flatbed scanner to create an image. The skill can be learnt in a few minutes but perfecting the art takes practice. Below is an image of work by Mary C Miller.