Layered Images

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Layering lets two pictures occupy the same place at once. Photographers found this early through double exposure, sometimes by accident, and 19th-century 'spirit photographs' used it to set ghostly figures beside sitters. In the 1920s Hannah Höch and László Moholy-Nagy used photomontage and superimposed negatives to match the overload of modern city life.

Painters and printmakers reached similar effects by other means. Francis Picabia's Transparencies of the late 1920s overlay faces, bodies and plants in thin outline, and Robert Rauschenberg's silkscreen paintings of the early 1960s stack news photographs in shifting, semi-transparent layers. Sigmar Polke later painted figures over printed fabrics and dot screens, so images compete within one surface, and David Spriggs builds layered images literally, on stacked transparent sheets. Look for which layer seems nearest and how the layers alter each other's meaning.