Inspired Photogram/Collage

For this image I went through national geographic magazines and found various landscape images, glued them to a paper, scanned the collage to a computer, changed it to grayscale in Photoshop, and printed it on transparency paper, then took my light-sensitive paper and developed the image in the darkroom, after several false starts and screwups I finally managed a photogram that had what I was looking for. After photographing my photogram and uploading it to my laptop, I edited it a little bit to try to emulate the style of Sally Mann.

Initially what I wanted to do was just create a collage of landscape photos, and make the image as sharp as possible in the style of Ansel Adams, but upon doing that I realized that it was a little dull, and added a piece to the collage with people in it. I still was hoping to make the image sharp, but I was experimenting in the dark room, only knowing the steps, and not how to correct errors, such as the image being to light or dark, and I ended up with an image that was less sharp and defined then I had hoped, but rather than continue to try and change it and waste paper, I went with it, and made the collage a landscape image like Ansel Adams’ photos, but with the more surreal feel of Sally Mann’s photos.

With this photo, I tried to incorporate a variety of different images from national geographic magazines. I wanted to use a variety of images from very different locations, an icy plain, a tropical island, a mountain, and an arid desert. Just as Ansel Adams used his photographs of the natural wonders of the United States I wanted to draw attention to the natural wonders of the world, by combining three different locations in one image.