Photomontage vs Tableau Photography
フォトモンタージュ / タブロー写真
Photomontage comes from Photographic Techniques and Tableau Photography from Photography Movements. One is technique and the other style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Photomontage
Cuts and rejoins photographic fragments, assembling relations and critical meanings that never existed in the original reality.
Tableau Photography
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Assembles the scene before the shutter and holds it in a single print made to hang like a painting, its figures acting as if no viewer were there.
| Photomontage | Tableau Photography | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1910s– | 1970s |
| Family | Photographic Techniques | Photography Movements |
| Kind | Technique | Style |
| Cues | Cut-out photographs / Mixed scales / Visible seams / Reused print matter | A single large print made to hang / Figures who never look back at you / Interiors and streets built to the last corner / Lighting borrowed from cinema |
| Best used for | Turning political or advertising rhetoric against itself with its own pictures · Showing scenes and relations that never existed with the force of photography | Restaging the conventions of advertising or news images to cast doubt on them · Building a story into one frame meant for exhibition, not for record |
| Type | Cut headlines from existing print and paste them at unmatched sizes | Make the text in the frame as a prop rather than borrowing a typeface |
| Composition | Shift scale on purpose, putting small figures beside enormous objects | Fix gaze and hand positions in advance and block the frame like a painting |
| Material | Magazine and newspaper cuttings, paste, rephotography, seams kept or hidden | Built sets or models, cinematic lighting, large format shot and printed big |
| Caution | Copying only the cutting and pasting leaves fragments side by side with no collision, and the criticism the method existed for never lands. | Staging that only imitates a natural record leaves the assumption that photographs record reality untouched, and the whole reason for constructing the scene disappears. |