The history of the first photomontage in history dates back to the 19th century, when British photographer Henry Peach Robinson created the image entitled “Fading Away” in 1858.
The image “Fading Away” shows a dying girl lying in a bed, surrounded by her family. The image was not taken as a single photograph, but was created from five different negatives, which were merged to create a composite image.
Robinson used the wet collodion printing process to create each of the negatives, which were then assembled to create the final image. The result was an image with a high degree of realism and drama, which became a hit at the time.
The image “Fading Away” became an early example of photomontage, a technique that has been used in photography and art ever since. The technique of combining several images to create a single composite image has been used to create dramatic, surreal and abstract effects in photography and art.
We started making photomontages 130 years later.
It has always amazed us how a computer-generated image, a building for example, inserted into a real photo (a photo of the urban environment where it will be built) acquires a degree of realism almost effortlessly. It is as if the photo generously gives up part of its reality to share it.
Henry Peach Robinson championed photography as an art form throughout his professional career. In 1870 he was a member of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and in 1891 co-founder of Linked Ringde. His theoretical work “Pictorial Effect in Photography” (1869) was a benchmark of photographic pictorialism.
