Political Montage

For this project, the idea was to create a montage with a political theme, quite a straight forward task, the inspiration from this came from people like Peter Kennard. We had to base our images on subjects that interest or appeal to us, so I personally went for the war for oil subject, I find it to be interesting and offers a lot you can do.

A montage is a compilation of images that combined to make a large one, for the one I created I took a sunsetting over an oil field and then got silhouette of soldiers standing around and shooting and made it look like they where defending these fields or fighting for them, using phrases like "Freedom isn't free" to drive home the ideal that we are fighting a war just for oil.

Both images were made in Photoshop and are compiled of several images edited together, the first one I prefer as a piece, the setting sun in the background gives a great colour pallet, the black silhouettes of the oil rig and soldiers stand out so much more because of the colour.  The hidden message "Freedom isn't free" in the top right corner is made so it is a similar colour to the clouds, I did this because I find it drives the meaning of it, it's hidden and hard to find, almost like it is not meant to be.


The second one is a similar setting but I used an American flag instead of the silhouettes, the idea came from a postcard I got from a friend, a sun setting over a beach in California, so to replicate it I took a picture of a sunsetting over a large oil field, to add to it I put in a faded out picture of an American flag and then added the text. "Welcome to America! We believe in FREEDOM!" a personal issues that apples to me is the war for oil, a lot of the inspiration from Peter Kennard's work, using the simple images and mashing them together to make powerful messages, I'd like to do this project again because I believe I can produce better results, but I feel happy with the overall work.