Fantasy photomontage was popular in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, the point of which was to show fantastical scenes of the real and imaginary juxtaposed for amusement, and also to show off skill in what was then, and is still, considered a form of fine art.

One of my favorite examples of Fairy Photos is the Cottingley Fairy Photos of 1917, which turned out to be a hoax. The girls never admitted the photos were fakes, until they were extremely old, and explained that they had to do it the way they did, because there was no other way to show people what they had really seen with their own eyes.

There truly are unseen worlds hidden before our very eyes, tucked into our dreams, peppered in our peripheral vision. We think we see things, and then are gone like smoke and mist. The magic that permeated the green primeval forests of old has gone, but the inhabitants are still stirring about in lost and forgotten nooks and crannies, prodding our subconscious mind forward with a hodgepodge of photographic pieces like little clues, breadcrumbs to lead us back to the beginning.

I begin with a scene, a place that seems familiar, and look to find the hidden things, secret things, things that should be there. I build on that with other images and mix and blend them until it looks right, and feels true. I use dreams and experiences, stories and half-remembered visions as embellishments. The final images are not exact, but they’re as close a representation of what I want you to see as anything. A little Fairy Glamour, if you will, to make you see. An eternity walking on the edge of the light hand in hand with shadows and marinating in those dreams eventually bears the strange passions of delicious art fruit, fruit so delicious and real that you’ll believe you can really eat it, touch it, and be there, believing.

Photomontage is the process (and result) of making a composite photograph by cutting and pasting back together a number of other photographs; individual photos combined together to create a new subject or visual image. In the old way, the composite assemblage was sometimes photographed so that the final image was converted back into a seamless photographic print. In the beginning, around the mid 1800’s, the method was called “combination printing”. The term “photomontage” was coined by the Dada movement in the early 1900’s, and passed along to the European Surrealists who began to refer to it as “photocollage”. Today, the same methods are accomplished by using image-editing software. The technique when used with only photographs is referred to now by professionals as "compositing" (and sometimes "digital surrealism"), while traditional cut and paste physical collage is usually called “assemblage”.