Photography as art is more than meets the eye. From using photos in scrapbooks to creating wall-sized collages that one day could be museum pieces are just the beginning of making your photography into art.
I'm Matt Bamberg, one of the instructors at BetterPhoto.com, and I was fortunate enough to have attended an experimental program in the Interdisciplinary Arts Department at San Francisco State University. Outstanding program it was as it gave the subject of the visual arts a wide variety of extensions to every subject matter under the sun. Here I share an idea about making a piece of art work from your photographs.
Aliens
© Matthew A. Bamberg
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A New Angle on the Photo Set
The first photo I've ever sold was of a European subway station. It was sold to our mayor (Palm Springs, CA) at a show inside a coffee shop. I have hundreds of subway photographs that I've shot from all over the world. Right now I'm making a collage with them some of them, sorting them into groups by the levels you'd would actually travel underground to get to one subway line or another in order to create replication of a multi-level underground subway station. For example, the first row of pictures are photos of the cafes, stores at ground level, the second are photographs of escalators and staircases, the third is the platform where people catch the cars. Then I repeat going down three more levels. This is an experimental work, so I've still got to refine it. I'm also coating it with shellac - I paste the first coat over a couple of pictures, then use spray glue and paste a couple more and apply another coat and repeat so there are multiple levels of coatings, which I am hoping will give it a 3-D look. Tip: Experiment with your creative edge to produce new works of art from your photography. Save the work for future generations to see.
Art and Color Balance
Since the color balance on some photos don't match, I've mixed a little yellow paint into the shellac of the photo-collage to create a yellow tint of light over the entire (station) photograph.
Don't Reinvent the Wheel
As a curious artist (I like to say artist so I can take my photography to new visual and multimedia platforms), I make a trip to an art musuem (modern and otherwise) an absolute must when I travel. On one trip, I noticed a group of photographs where each small part of a street scene were placed side-by-side to create one whole street. All of the photographs were taken in the '70s. While the idea of pasting the images one-next-to-the-other is not new, the fact that the work still exists was. For years, I've always wanted to create a scene like this of my own.
When One Thing Looks Like Another
What's most interesting about taking photographs of light fixtures is the effect - a space theme - -that I got from including the light fixtures within my frame.
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Article by Matthew A. Bamberg. To learn more about photography, explore the many online photography and Photoshop classes offered here at BetterPhoto.com.
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