Fractured Reality of Cubist Photography
Every act of construction is an act of destruction
Pablo Picasso
The cubist montages are my foray into cubist photography. The idea came from a multitude of sources – mirror tiled walls of a dinner theatre in Montreal where I was the lighting designer for the now long defunct “Les Masques” dinner theatre. I have always been drawn to Picasso’s work, and  the Polaroids of David Hockney. The dinner theatre was tiled with small 1 inch square mirrors. The broken reflections were hypnotizing -it was fascinating how “reality” fractured in the uneven surface of the mirrors. The reflections gave brief glimpses reminiscent of Picasso and Braques’ Cubist paintings.
[Click on an image to go to the Gallery]
Les InconNUS
Still Life
Exteriors
Musical Intruments
I started with shooting still lifes The first trial method was taking multiple images, cutting apart the prints and pasting pieces back together. While the results were moderately successful, I constantly kept looking for the crayons and developed a severe cookies and milk dependancy. The only way to make duplicate images was to rephotograph the original. I used the same method when invited to take images of a building under construction in Montreal. I re-photographed the resulting collage to ‘flatten out’ the uneven surface caused by gluing the many layers. The results were well received in the ensuing exhibition, but I was not pleased with the technique. David Hockney was using multiple Polaroids and not overlapping the individual pieces in his “joiners”. Hockney’s technique was ideally suited to Polaroid film. I am a big fan of Hockney’s work, and made many attempts to interpret his “joiners” using conventional film, in order to make multiple copies of final images. In the next attempt I decided to reproduce how I first came to see the images. I shot the reflections in mirrors, using a variety of differently shaped mirrors attached to different surfaces ranging from canvas to masonite board using a variety of “tricks” in order to make the pieces moveable and reusable. The results were only moderately successful, the only positive result being that I became pretty proficient at accurately cutting mirrors. Over the years I had made many attempts all falling short of what I wanted. I even attempted trying to shoot mutliple exposures by in-camera masking in both 35mm and 4X5 formats. Taking a cue from Jerry Uelsman, I tried assembling the many images I needed in the darkroom, but that too created it’s own set of problems and disappointments. Cutting and gluing bits of chopped up 4X5 negs opened up new headaches – literally but more so from the glue! Flash forward to 2001, and I found myself in possession of an early model digital camera which turned out to be an electronic disappointment that managed to chew through AA batteries as if I were the only stockholder in Duracell. In order to rationalize the camera, I needed to find something to do with it despite lacking basic features necessary to make it viable for any commercial work. The image size was a major issue, barely yielding a 4X6 inch sized images at 300 pixel per inch.. What if I could stitch together several images ? I began experimented by combining several images, and quickly saw the potential when manipulated through Photoshop to create Cubist Photography images.
The first successful digital cubist photo success was a Yamaha Classical Guitar, propped up against a radiator at shared studio on St-Laurent Blvd in the Plateau area of Montreal. The various parts of the image were photographed from different angles and then all the images were reassembled in Photoshop. I shot several images with that camera, until an ex-friend broke it just days before he vanished with a few thousand dollars of studio equipment. I soon afterward started shooting the montages with a Canon d60 then the 10d, followed by a 20d and onto the 5D’s. The technique is now second nature, and relies on multiple images of a scene or subject taken fro a variety of different angles to optimize the desired result. The images have become larger with each new camera generation. To date the largest image I have created is in the range of 3 meters by 10 meters with some 300 pieces.
Learn more about David Hockney
Learn more about Pablo Picasso