Photomontage in art
Around the time that John Heartfield was developing the language of political photomontage, another artist, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, was using photography in conjunction with drawn geometric shapes. The effect was to cause a visual conflict between the print viewed as a factual record of three-dimensional reality and the print as a two-dimensional surface pattern.
This important work ensured that many contemporary artists would continue to use the camera as a creative tool. Some have found ‘straight photography’ limited as a medium for visualizing their own personal ideas or abstract concepts within a single image.
Image manipulation and photomontage are two ways that photography can be used by the artist to communicate in more complex ways.
Surrealism
Surrealism followed Dadaism and photography was found to be an ideal tool and so became directly involved in this movement as it had been in Dadaism.
Surrealist images are constructed from the imagination rather than from reality. Many of the works by surrealist painters such as Salvador Dali and René Magritte appear as fantastic dream sequences where familiar objects are placed in unusual settings.
Parts of the image may be distorted in scale or shape and the impossible is often visualized. Inspired by the work of these surrealists Angus McBean, in the 1930s, produced a whole series of photomontages of actors and actresses. The photographs are a strange mixture of fantasy and portraiture where the character is often surrounded by props from their current play.
Joiners
David Hockney has used photomontage in many of his works. Individual photographs have been placed together to create a larger photographic collage which Hockney has termed a ‘Joiner’. The number of prints in each Joiner may vary depending on how much information Hockney feels he needs to explore in the subject matter.
In some of his Joiners he has photographed more than one side of an object or person and then placed the individual images together to create a single picture. This technique was used by cubist painters such as Georges Braque and Picasso who show many facets of objects on a single canvas. Hockney has taken this one stage further and presented the subject at different moments in time. The photographic instant has been lengthened in some of Hockney’s Joiners to become a study of a ‘happening’, different views from different times during the same event. A picture of a card game is no longer a record of that game at one particular moment but rather a study of the whole game.
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