Photographic mosaic

Mosaic composed of smaller photographs

A photographic mosaic or photomosaic is a picture (usually a photograph) that has been divided into tiled sections, usually equal sized, each of which is replaced with another photograph that matches the target photo. When viewed at low magnifications, the individual pixels appear as the primary image, while close examination reveals that the image is in fact made up of many hundreds or thousands of smaller images. It is illustrated with a very pixelated version of the portrait of Abraham Lincoln in the 5 dollar bill. 1974 1976 Salvador Dalí paints two versions of Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea which at a distance of 20 meters is transformed into the portrait of Abraham Lincoln (Homage to Rothko). The gray blocks in Harmon's portrait are substituted by square shaped subpictures forming the image of a nude Gala Dalí looking through a window. 1977 Dalí prints a lithograph Lincoln in Dalivision based in his previous paintings. 1993 Joseph Francis, working for R/Greenberg Associates in Manhattan, is believed to be the inventor of the modern day computer generated colour image versions. His Live from Bell Labs poster created in 1993 used computer themed tile photographs to create a mosaic of a face (Ryszard Horowitz/ Photography and Art Direction, Robert Bowen/ Digital Artist). He went on to create a mosaic for Animation Magazine in 1993, which was repeated in Wired Magazine (November 1994, p. 106). Francis has said on his "History of Photo Mosaics" webpage that his interest in developing these techniques further was in part stimulated by the work of artist Chuck Close. 1994 Dave McKean creates an image for DC Comics, a mosaic of a face made from photos of faces, although this is believed to be created manually using Photoshop. 1994 Adam Finkelstein and Sandy Farrier create a mosaic of John F. Kennedy from parts of Marilyn Monroe pictures. The result was displayed in the Xerox PARC Algorithmic Art Show in 1994. 1994 Benetton: AIDS Faces mosaic. Over one thousand young peoples' portraits from all over the word computer processed spell out the word AIDS. 1995 The Gioconda Sapiens, a face with ten thousand faces, was presented to the public in April 1995 (Spain, Domus museum). This was the first large photographic mosaic, using photographs of 10,062 people from 110 countries to make the Mona Lisa. 1995 Adam Finkelstein (published mosaic in Mossy Bits) creates a mosaic of the 1930 oil painting by Grant Wood, American Gothic, from images collected from the Web in early 1995. 1995 Robert Silvers creates an algorithm for generating Photomosaics programmatically and goes on to trademark the term Photomosaic and patent his process for creation of Photomosaics in 1997. The name Photomosaic and an implementation concept were trademarked by Robert Silvers' Runaway Technology, Inc. The making of a photomosaic is sometimes parallelled and compared to forms of artistic appropriation, like literary assemblage. Artists such as David Hockney, Christopher Kates and Pep Ventosa have pioneered their own photographic mosaic techniques where multiple photographs are taken of a scene and then pieced together again to create a cohesive image.

Photographic mosaics are typically formed from a collection of still images. A more recent phenomenon, however, has been video mosaics which assemble video clips rather than still images to create a larger image. The closing credits of the 2005 PlayStation 2 game God of War, for example, incorporates a still image of the main character, Kratos, formed from a number of in game videos. The term "video mosaic" also describes a large still image made from adjacent frames of video, such as those from video shots of geographic features like roads or cities. A mosaic of the video's relevant frames replaces the full video, saving time and bandwidth, since the stills are much smaller.