Page 57 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

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Hill and Adamson: First General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland: the signing of the act of separation and deed of demission, May 1843
The earliest example of the fusion of composite photography and painting is this large painted composite oil-painting by David Octavius Hill, in which he uses no less than 474 individual photographs of each of the members of the dissenting general assembly, taken by his partner, the photographer Robert Adamson. Hill - who was an artist painter before he was a photographer, then spent over twenty years painting - from the individual photo-portraits - and compositing them all into the commemorative General Assembly group portrait.
The General Assembly is an oil painting, but it illustrates clearly the ability of the artist/photographer to manipulate his images in the dark-room, and in his studio, cutting and pasting them into new configurations - is demonstrated here for the first time. Oscar Gustav Rejlander was to follow this a decade or so later, with his Two Ways of Life (1857). This marks a step change or ‘expansion’ for the photographic medium - a change that was to be fully exploited in the development of the modernist photo-montage in the 20th century, and in later graphic-design practice after that...