Enfolding Perspectives: Photographic Collage

by Simran Gleason

The Early Work

Here are some pictures I made when I first discovered the "medium" of photocollage. I found it very freeing and did a lot of experimenting (i.e. screwups!) while evolving the handling of space that I was really after.

Pigeon Point Lighthouse (gif 152K)
The first photocollage I ever did. On a bike trip to Pigeon Point (from Stanford). After months of struggling with the one-point perspective enforced by the box geometry of the camera, I saw some photocollages done by a friend who had just taken a seminar with David Hockney in Yosemite. I decided to try the technique myself.

Palace of the Fine Arts (gif 132K)
in San Francisco. taken using a single lens, pointed at various parts of the picture. You can see how fish-eye pictures originate.

Old Page Mill (Early Version) (gif 120K)
In this version I'm directly trying to emulate a Chinese painting with a foreground, middle ground, and distant ground rising successively higher, fading into a white background. Each level is enlarged bigger than a simple one-point perspective would dictate.

Old Page Mill (gif 184K)
View of Old Page Mill Road in Palo Alto, from the Stanford Hills.
In this version I made a much smoother transition from the wide-angle lens in the foreground to a longer lens at the horizon. This makes a more coherent space which looks more like a "standard" photograph than the early version, while still embodying the perspective transformations.

Church of the Nativity (gif 168K)
A tall, majestically-spired church in Menlo Park. Here, I guess, is a case where I took the perpective transformations a bit too far and ended up with this squat little dumpy building. Oh well. I guess, as William Blake? said: "You don't know how much is enough until you know how much is too much." [paraphrase?].

Roses (gif 200K)
Experiments with a macro lens.

Simran Gleason