Combination Printing

Combination printing is the making of a single photographic print from two or more separately exposed negatives, joined so that they read as one continuous picture. It developed in the mid-1850s, when wet collodion negatives were so sensitive to blue light that a sky exposed for the land or sea below printed as blank paper. Landscape photographers answered by printing a separate cloud negative into the sky, and Gustave Le Gray's seascapes of 1856–1858 joined one negative exposed for the water with another exposed for the clouds. Figure compositions followed. In 1855 the Scottish photographers Berwick and Annan exhibited a figure printed into a landscape from another plate, and in 1857 Oscar Gustave Rejlander assembled The Two Ways of Life, an allegory modeled on history painting, from more than thirty negatives. Henry Peach Robinson's Fading Away (1858), made from five negatives, became the best-known example.

In practice, each negative is printed in turn onto the same sheet, in the nineteenth century usually albumen paper exposed in contact with the plate, while masks cover the areas reserved for the other negatives. Planning, registration and blending at the mask edges hide the seams, though in many seascapes the join remains visible along the horizon. For staged scenes, models were posed and photographed group by group, giving control over gesture, expression and placement that a single exposure could not provide. Typical subjects were dramatic skies, allegories, literary illustrations and sentimental genre scenes. In the 1960s Jerry N. Uelsmann revived the method with a row of enlargers, moving one sheet of paper from station to station and masking each section to build seamless, dreamlike images. He called this way of working "post-visualization," reversing Ansel Adams's principle of previsualization.

From the outset the method raised questions about photographic truth. The Two Ways of Life was attacked for its nude figures, and Fading Away unsettled viewers because a deathbed scene had been staged and assembled rather than witnessed. In Naturalistic Photography (1889), Peter Henry Emerson condemned multiple-negative pictures as artificial and accepted only the printing-in of clouds. Combination printing differs from double exposure, which records several images on one negative, and is usually treated as a forerunner of photomontage, which also includes cut-and-pasted prints.