Asunder
Digital Montage, 2010
Assembling the City: A Digital Photomontage Series
This series of digital photomontages began as a simple exploration: a way to learn Photoshop while capturing the Paris that drew my attention in fleeting moments. Wandering through different neighborhoods, I photographed streets, façades, lights, details, and people — fragments of the city’s rhythm, textures, and atmosphere. Each image was a spontaneous observation, a pause to notice what often goes unnoticed in the everyday flow of urban life.
Back home, the real transformation began. On my computer, I revisited each photograph, isolating elements, experimenting with layers, masks, and blending modes. Slowly, what started as a collection of fragments evolved into new compositions: streets intersecting in impossible ways, reflections merging with buildings that never meet, architectural forms and human figures juxtaposed to create surreal perspectives. The process of photomontage allowed me to manipulate time, space, and scale, collapsing different Parisian quarters into a single imagined cityscape.
The beauty of photomontage lies in this tension between the familiar and the uncanny. Each composition retains the texture and detail of the original photograph — the cobblestones, shop signs, wrought iron balconies, and fleeting human gestures — but reconfigures them into scenes that challenge perception. It is both a technical and imaginative exercise: technically, in mastering selection, masking, and layering; imaginatively, in deciding which visual narratives emerge when elements collide in unexpected ways.
Through these montages, Paris becomes a playground of possibilities — a city simultaneously real and imagined, grounded in memory and observation yet liberated by digital intervention. The series reflects both a learning process and an artistic exploration, revealing the hidden connections, contrasts, and harmonies that exist within the urban fabric when one allows creativity to rearrange reality.