Can one photograph a dream? Early twentieth-century Surrealists used photography to lend a ring of truth to impossible fantasies and dreams. Photographs don’t lie? In those days of cutting and pasting by hand, some photos told whoppers.
Tom Chambers began compositing his fantastic visions after digital photography made it easier to blur the edge between reality and imagination. Hearts and Bones: A Retrospective of Tom Chambers’ Photomontage Art presents a retrospective of Chambers’s work from 1997 to 2017 with over one hundred full-page, high-quality reproductions that display his subtle mastery of color as well as his seamless blending of the real and the unreal.
Although Chambers says that some of the images come to him on the edge of sleep, he credits magic realism, the literary and art genre that arose in Latin America, rather than Surrealism, as an influence (9). Instead of conjuring visions that are beyond belief or...
University of California Press