These articles are written especially for Ewell and Stoneleigh Connection, a free monthly magazine circulated to homes and businesses in the area.
Composite
A
favourite technique of professional photographer-filmmaker Frank
Hurley was composite printing, where two or more negatives were
combined to make a print. Basically an early form of Photoshop,
except I imagine the process in the 1900s was more laborious. It
wasn't employed to minimise (and improve) flaws or enhance features
but to maximise visual impact. Hurley was often disappointed with the
results of straight photography (a single negative); he wanted to
make his images more real, more vibrant and give to the viewer a
heightened reality that appealed to all their senses. This he
achieved by combining different skies – inserting clouds – with a
primary subject or introducing a primary subject – such as the ship
Aurora
– to a scene; or by placing a figure, as does painting, in a
landscape to establish scale: a human dwarfed by an ice structure.
Hurley, I read, created multiple versions of his most famous works,
varying one element or more. His need to create – to improve upon
or experiment – never stopped.
Did
I feel cheated? A little. I saw the skill. I saw the artistic value.
But I thought I'd begun to recognise the straight from the combined –
the photographer's eye from the artist's, which to my mind lessened
the effect; only however to still be fooled a number of times.
Hurley
falls into two camps: documentary and art. His camera tells the
truth; his camera lies.
