This presentation explores photomontage as an artistic and methodological practice for engaging affect in everyday urban life. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and Kathleen Stewart, it considers how photographic fragments, when assembled rather than explained, can open a space for attending to the subtle intensities that shape lived experience.

Barthes’s writing frames the photograph as an affective encounter that resists narrative interpretation, while Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image offers montage as a method through which fragments collide, interrupt linear time, and generate moments of awakening. Stewart’s notion of ordinary affects situates these encounters in the textures of daily life, where feeling circulates through atmospheres, gestures, and surfaces rather than stable meanings.

Through photomontages created in Vancouver, the presentation demonstrates how assembling urban fragments can slow perception and hold images in relation. Rather than documenting the city, the works linger with interruptions, small encounters, and sensory traces. For immigrants living between places, this practice also becomes a quiet form of care, offering a way to stay with moments of estrangement, tenderness, and belonging. Photomontage, in this sense, supports an attentive, relational way of looking, knowing and feeling that emerges through proximity, interruption, and shared urban life.

Authors:
Peisen Ding, University of British Columbia, Canada

About the Presenter(s)
Peisen Ding is a sessional lecturer and PhD candidate in Art Education at the University of British Columbia. Peisen's research explores art practices engaging the built environment, identity, and affect within educational contexts.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Saturday Schedule

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