Photomontage

Photomontage is the process and the result of making a

History

Author

The first and most famous mid-Victorian photomontage (then called

In late Victorian North America, William Notman of Montreal used photomontage to commemorate large social events which could not otherwise be captured on film. Fantasy photomontage postcards were also popular in the late Victorian era and Edwardian era.^[4] One of the preeminent producers in this period was the Bamforth & Co Ltd, of Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, and New York. The high point of its popularity came, however, during World War I, when photographers in France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, and Hungary produced a profusion of postcards showing soldiers on one plane and lovers, wives, children, families, or parents on another.^[5] Many of the early examples of fine-art photomontage consist of photographed elements superimposed on watercolours, a combination returned to by (e.g.) George Grosz in about 1915.

20th century

Heartfield, Grosz, and Dada

In 1916, John Heartfield and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together, a form of art later named "Photomontage.”

George Grosz wrote, "When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my South End studio at five o’clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it."^[6][7]

John Heartfield and George Grosz were members of Berlin Club Dada (1916–1920).^[8] The German Dadists were instrumental in making montage into a modern art-form. The term "photomontage” became widely known at the end of World War I, around 1918 or 1919.[5]

Heartfield used photomontage extensively in his innovative book dust jackets for the Berlin publishing house Malik-Verlag.^[9][10] He revolutionized the look of these book covers. Heartfield was the first to use photomontage to tell a “story” from the front cover of the book to the back cover. He also employed groundbreaking typography to enhance the effect.^[11]

From 1930 to 1938, John Heartfield used photomontage to create 240 “Photomontages of The Nazi Period”^[12][13] to use art as a weapon against fascism and The Third Reich. The photomontages appeared on street covers all over Berlin on the cover of the widely circulated AIZ magazine published by Willi Münzenberg, Heartfield lived in Berlin until April, 1933, when he escaped to Czechoslovakia after he was targeted for assassination by the SS. Continuing to produce anti-fascist art in Czechoslovakia until 1938, Heartfield's political photomontages earned him the number five position on the Gestapo's Most Wanted List.

Hannah Höch began experimenting with photomontage in 1918. Höch worked for Ullstein Verlag designing knitting and embroidery patterns that were inspired by her photomontage work of the time.^[14] She continued to work with photomontage for almost the rest of her life, even after she broke from the Berlin Dadaists.

Other major artists who were members of Berlin Club Dada and major exponents of photomontage were

Parallel to the Germans, Russian Constructivist artists such as El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, and the husband-and-wife team of Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina created pioneering photomontage work as propaganda, such as in the journal USSR in Construction, for the Soviet government.

In the Americas

Following his exile to Mexico in the late 1930s, Spanish Civil War activist and montage artist,

In Argentina during the late 1940s, the German exile, Grete Stern, began to contribute photomontage work on the theme of Sueños (Dreams), as part of a regular psychoanalytical article in the magazine, Idilio.^[18]

Postwar photomontage

The pioneering techniques of early photomontage artists were co-opted by the advertising industry from the late 1920s onward. The American photographer Alfred Gescheidt, while working primarily in advertising and commercial art in the 1960s and 1970s, used photomontage techniques to create satirical posters and postcards.^[19]: 139

Starting in the 1960s, Jerry Uelsmann became influential in the photomontage world, using multiple enlargers to utilize many techniques that would someday influence digital photomontage, down to the naming of tools in Photoshop. In 1985 he even published a book demonstrating and explaining his techniques, two years before Thomas and John Knoll began selling Photoshop through Adobe.

Ten years later in 1995, Adobe's creative director Russel Brown tried to get Uelsmann to test out Photoshop. Uelsmann didn't like it, but his wife Maggie Taylor did, and began using it to produce digital photomontage, becoming a founder of the modern genre.

Techniques

Other methods for combining images are also called photomontage, such as Victorian "combination printing", the printing of more than one negative on a single piece of printing paper (e.g.

20th century Xerox technology made possible the ability to copy both flat images and three-dimensional objects using the copier as a scanning camera. Such copier images could then be combined with real objects in a traditional cut-and-glue collage manner.

Contemporary photograph editors in magazines now create "paste-ups" digitally. Creating a photomontage has, for the most part, become easier with the advent of computer software such as

A photomontage may contain elements at once real and imaginary. Combined photographs and digital manipulations may set up a conflict between aesthetics and ethics – for instance, in fake photographs that are presented to the world as real news. For example, in the United States, the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) has set out a Code of Ethics promoting the accuracy of published images, advising that photographers "do not manipulate images ... that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects."^[21]

Scrapbooking

Photomontage also may be present in the scrapbooking phenomenon, in which family images are pasted into scrapbooks and a collage created along with paper ephemera and decorative items.

Digital art scrapbooking employs a computer to create simple collage designs and captions. The amateur scrapbooker can turn home projects into professional output, such as CDs, DVDs, displays on television, uploads to a website for viewing, or assemblies into one or more books for sharing.

Photograph manipulation

Photograph manipulation refers to alterations made to an image. Often, the goal of photograph manipulation is to create another 'realistic' image. This has led to numerous political and ethical concerns, particularly in journalism.

Gallery

Examples by modern artists

• 
  Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, 1919
• 
  Gustav Klutsis, design for a stand at the entrance to an exhibition, 1920
• 
  El Lissitzky, The Constructor, 1924

Other

• 
  Composite of 11 different images
• 
  Perspective run
• 
  Photomontage showing what a complete iceberg might look like under water
• 
  Fotocollage
• 
  A modern photomontage
• 
  Showing five digits instead of four

Gallery of jane.jeruto Eldoretian like many of Eding

See also

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Photomontages.

• "Official John Heartfield Exhibition & Archive", Dada and Political Photomontage, January 9, 2017.
• "Life through a lens: A different perspective," Ealing Times; January 3, 2006.
• Greek Olympics; Outdoor Advertising Association of America
• "HP Celebrates America's Inventiveness by Creating World's Largest Digital Image," HP website. See also Business Wire; June 12, 2002.
• "A Portrait of Goldwater Is a Computer-Aided Mosaic of His Own," The Chronicle of Higher Education; February 1, 2002.
• "Musings on Collage: The Photomontages of Romare Bearden". The New York Times. May 11, 1997.
• Photomontage Artists
• A timeline of fantastic photomontage and its possible influences, 1857–2007
• Cut & Paste: a history of photomontage
• Composite Photographs Historical essay on William Notman, with video clips.
• Interactive Digital Photomontage – a technical paper on a semi-automated approach to photomontage, published at SIGGRAPH 2004.