George Bourne photo-montage

George Bourne, Flax flying machine over Auckland Harbour, 1917.

There is a common perception that in pre-Photoshop days photographers didn’t manipulate their pictures nor make composite images. However, photomontage is almost as old as photography itself, with photographers often making their images from more than one negative.

George Chance, for example, regularly added skies he had shot months or years earlier to his works. Newspaper photographer George Bourne, a pioneer of aerial photography in New Zealand, made a series of humorous montages for friends and family, and for the Auckland Weekly News Christmas edition, between 1909 and 1922.