This section presents student projects developed in an undergraduate course on queer photography in nineteenth-century France. Through photomontage, students examine how images construct gender and then intervene in those constructions by transforming photographs that reproduce prejudicial or restrictive visual norms. Photomontage is an artistic technique that involves blending various photographs or photographic elements into a single composite image. This method can be used to create a new visual context, convey complex narratives, or produce surreal and imaginative scenes that would be difficult or impossible to capture in a single photograph. Photomontages are often used in art, advertising, and editorial design to communicate ideas or emotions in a visually striking and innovative way
Each project begins with a source image and a short visual analysis of the gendered assumptions it conveys. Students then identify the visual strategies they will use to alter its meaning—through framing, juxtaposition, pose, gesture, costume, or composition—in order to produce a more open, inclusive, or critically self-aware representation.
The final photomontage is therefore not simply a creative exercise. It is a method of visual analysis. By reworking an existing image, students test how photographic meaning is made and how it can be reassigned. These projects show that photographs do not merely reflect gender norms: they help produce them, and they can also be used to question and transform them.