Page 58 - 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 (detail)
In detail you can see something of Hill’s modus operandi - it looks as though he cut-out Adamson’s individual portraits (after getting Adamson to print them to more or less the same scale) and montaged them in place, then used this as a guide and as reference for his oil-painting. That could be Robert Adamson with the sliding box camera( centre top) - the foreground figures (signing to left) are of course scaled-up. Look at the painterly detail - though it is obviously derived from a montage... the essential separateness of individuals supposedly in the ‘group’, is apparent from their disconnected expressions and unconnected sight-lines.