Montage - Me and the Pooches

Montage 2013

I have created his montage as part of my brief for college. With this montage I have combined memories of my childhood that lead to today and my plans and aspirations as professional photographer. 

It displayes a digitally photographed self portrait of me and my boxer dog Carlo (left) showing how close we are. Carlo helped me bearing with some very difficult situations in my life. He is my trusted and beloved companion who manages to make me smile even in darkest hours. He is a clown disguised as Boxer Dog and shows his unconditional love every single day (yes, also when he's digging out the daffodils in the garden). On the right hand side it's me aged 5 with my Boxer Dog Bianka. We were the best friends and I very often was found sound asleep with her in her dog bed or her shed in the garden. She helped my through the very ugly divorce my parents had. Recurring pattern: dog emotionally helping me by simply being around. Both photographs are very similar by showing me being close and cuddling with my pooch. I am currently setting up my own business combining two of my greatest passions in life: dogs and photography. 

For the image of baby me in the montage I have scanned (300 dpi, EPSON scanner) a b&w photography. To fill the gaps and smoothen the borders of the images I have added two layers of texture (treebark and moss). Additionally I have scanned a pigeon's feather I found on the street. I selected the image of the feather with the magnetic lasso tool in Photoshop and dragged it to my montage. There I copied it and transformed it with the free transform tool scaling it down and flipping it vertically and setting the opacity at around 70 % so they are visually not too solid in this image. I have arranged and assembled all the layers and images on a A3 canvas that I have created the very first thing when I started working on the montage.

On the layers of the tree bark and the moss I have worked with the brush tool (opacity 100 %, feathered brush) to reveil the images of me and my dogs that are underneath. 

I kept the image black and white since the self portrait and the scanned photograph of me are monochrome. I have tried a version with keeping the moss green but it looked like a sad attempt to viciously pressing some colour into a b&w image and made it look tacky. 

When I started this photography course in college I had never worked with Photoshop before and it was very hard for me to understand the principles of this software. Over the months I have become a bit more aquainted with it. I am still not a big fan of over-photoshopping. I believe in taking good pictures and tweaking and enhancing them a bit with photoshop but not in creating completely new images with it. Photoshop and I have come to terms and I start to actually know what I'm doing when working with it.

I have mentioned it because for that reason I find it difficult to evaluate this montage. I like the images of me with the Boxers and also the overall appearance with the texture and the monochromatic look. Although the feathers don't have anything to do with the statement of the montage I really like them as a connecting element. 

Probably a visually more 'russian' approach with cut out and scanned graphics of 'naive art' could have worked as well and probably would have added that extra bit of quirkiness that this montage might lack. But I honestly am not sure what is missing to make this an outstanding work. I probably will create a montage again just to train my Photoshop skills but I must admit, it is very unlikely that it becomes my favorite task within the world of photography. It's a fact: I don't really believe in constructed and overly manipulated images.