The Digital Photo Collage

On this week’s episode of the B&H Photography Podcast, we welcome two artists whose work blurs the lines between street photography, documentary, installation and digital art, while cultivating a contemporary interpretation of the art and craft of collage. Both artists utilize photography-based processes and take urban architecture and street scenes as their subject, but from there, the work goes in very different directions.

Jennifer Williams creates large, often site-specific collages that inspect but distort the architectural scenes she documents. As she has stated, “The rectilinear shape that is the traditional photograph never fulfilled my desire to show everything in a space,” and that will be immediately clear upon seeing her work. Layering images of buildings upon one another, she creates angular and abstract collages while still providing a path for the viewer to connect the image she creates with the neighborhood or street that she photographed. Williams speaks about her process, including the original imaging, her adjustments in post-process, and her large-scale installations, often made on Photo Tex media. We also touch on previous explorations of the city as diverse as Edward Ruscha, Danny Lyon and and Jane Jacobs.

Tommy Mintz wrote a software program that creates “automated digital collages” and he has experimented over the years with how he (and the program) composes the street scenes he photographs. The tools he uses for image capture and computation have evolved and become more powerful, but unlike the painstaking control Williams exercises over her collages, the key element in Mintz’s process is the random arrangement and layering of images that the software creates. This is not to say that his images are out of his control—after all, he wrote the program. He selects the scenes to photograph and he does adjust the final product in Photoshop, but the software-generated placement of images creates layers, unexpected shadows, multiple exposures and even seeming glitches that add up to an intriguing and whimsical take on street photography.

Join us as we learn about the conceptualizations and processes of these two visual artists and hear how they integrate the Nodal Ninja, Epson 24" printers, and the Sigma dp2 Quattro Digital Camera into their workflow.

Guests: Jennifer Williams and Tommy Mintz

Image © Tommy Mintz