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Art Photography / Painting Imititation
Pictorialism, an approach to photography that emphasizes beauty of subject matter, tonality, and composition rather than the documentation of reality. The name itself derived from the thought of Henry Peach Robinson, British author of Pictorial Effect in Photography (1869). -
"The Two Ways of Life" by Oscar Rejlander
The first and most famous mid-Victorian photomontage (then called combination printing) was "The Two Ways of Life" (1857) by Oscar Rejlander, followed shortly thereafter by the images of photographer Henry Peach Robinson such as "Fading Away" (1858). These works actively set out to challenge the then-dominant painting and theatrical tableau vivants. -
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Spirit photography
Spirit photography (also called ghost photography) is a type of photography whose primary goal is to capture images of ghosts and other spiritual entities, especially in ghost hunting. It dates back to the late 19th century. The end of the American Civil War and the mid-19th Century Spiritualism movement contributed greatly to the popularity of spirit photography. -
Spirit Photograph, Frederick Hudson
Frederick Hudson's "Spirit Photograph" (1872) can be seen in the left picture below. This is the first known spirit photograph that shows the 'levitation' of a table. The levitation happens in the presence of a man and a 'spirit'. Levitation and flying is a theme that is dominant in contemporary nu-real photography; possibly this arises out of seeing a handful of key Lartigue photographs, but in most cases it probably also reflect an awareness of early spirit photography. -
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Pictorial Photography based on Impressionism
Impressionist photography is a term used to describe the work of photographers who evoke the pictorial vision of Impressionism and turn it into photography using their camera almost as a paintbrush, while also calling to mind the mysterious, dreamlike qualities that lie beneath the surface of this world. -
La Nature
Surreal photomontages were published in the French La Nature (1893), republished in Scientific American, and then included in Woodbury (1896). In some of the images we can perhaps see the influence of Carroll's Alice. The pictures appear on pages 132-134 of LN and are headed "Recreations Photographiques" and credited to an "M. R. Riccart", now unknown. Old copies of La Nature would later provide a fertile mine of ideas for Max Ernst (see Krauss, The Optical Unconscious). -
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Surreal seaside photography
A head, a hole, a 'trick' photo From around 1900 until the early 1980s painted wooden boards were a common feature of seaside promenades and piers. A photograph of the board would be taken with a person's head in a hole, thus creating a 'trick' photograph. The paintings used were often somewhat fantastic in nature. Millions of people would have seen this simple method of using photography to create a fantastical picture. -
British Postcards
Eccentric and mesmerist postcards Popular photographic postcards circulated in Britain, showing fantastic scenes — such as the "If London were Venice" (circa 1902), and "Hypnotised and Suspended", part of a series. -
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Straight Photography
Pure photography or straight photography refers to photography that attempts to depict a scene or subject in sharp focus and detail, in accordance with the qualities that distinguish photography from other visual media, particularly painting. Originating as early as 1904, the term was used by critic Sadakichi Hartmann in the magazine Camera Work, and later promoted by its editor, Alfred Stieglitz, as a more pure form of photography than Pictorialism. -
German Postcards
Propaganda postcards Below is a pungent 1905 example of anti-British propaganda in a German postcard — a decade before John Heartfield 'invented' political photomontage in Germany. -
French Postcards
'Out at last' is a circa-1905 photomontage postcard from France, which possibly had political meaning to people at the time. -
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Political Satire in Dadaism
Photomontage is often used as a means of expressing political dissent. It was first used as a technique by the dadaists in 1915 in their protests against the First World War. -
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ANTI ART
Dadaism paintings run the gamut from works of collage, to technical diagrams, to propaganda, to works of pure abstraction. Dadaism was a reaction against cultural logic, which the Dadaists blamed for leading humanity to the brink of suicide. As Western culture’s first manifestation of “anti-art,” Dadaism challenged every aesthetic phenomenon that pre-dated it, and shaped all that were to come. -
DADA: First documented photomontage
Jedermann sein eigner Fussball ("Everyman His Own Football") was a single-issue illustrated satirical magazine published by Malik Verlag (Wieland Herzfelde's publishing house) on 15 February 1919; the German police arrested staff and confiscated copies immediately on publication. It included two photomontages by John Heartfield on the front cover and six line drawings by George Grosz. -
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany
Composed of clippings from mass media, this large photomontage combines images of industrial machines, leading contemporary figures, and text, in disruptive but ironic juxtapositions. Implicitly commenting upon Weimar society, the work assembles images of establishment figures around the phrase "anti-dada" while various anti-establishment radicals and artists cluster around the word "DADA". -
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Advertising in Britain and Germany
Simple photomontage, and graphic combinations of photographs, had begun to be used in the illustrated popular press of Britain and Germany. This was a trend which had been apparent from since before the First World War. Inevitably, the loss of men during the Great War, and later the Depression, caused publishers seek easier and cheaper sources of pictures than illustrators. Photomontage was only introduced into U.S. advertising in the early 1940s, by Paul Rand. -
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Fashion Photomontage in Surrealism
Fashion photography and photomontage inspired by surrealism. "The surrealist photographers (Man Ray, Raoul Hausman, Bill Brandt, Brassai, etc.) rarely used photomontage." — from: Photographic Conditions of Surrealism (1984), and... "comparatively few surrealists persisted with photomontage after initial experiments" — from: Ades, Photomontage (1976). An interesting mid 1930s exception is Dora Maar. -
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Soviet Propaganda posters
Soviet Photomontage Artists in Soviet Russia were also among the first to experiment with the subversive nature of photomontage throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitsky, Gustav Klutsis, Piotr Galadzev and Varvara Stepanova, exploring the power of collaged together photographic material to represent revolutionary government ideals, or as educational tools of propaganda. -
At the Bauhaus
Some photomontages were made at the Bauhaus — Laszlo Moholy-Nagy created around sixty photomontages from circa 1922 (interestingly, while sharing a studio with Kurt Schwitters). While Moholy-Nagy's photocollages show a Soviet Constructivist influence, many strive to appear seamless and internally coherent; and in some of the works he used fantastic composites to express his emotional inner life. -
Construcivism, El Lissitzky Self-Portrait (The Constructor)
This photomontage, which combines elements of collage, drawing, and the photogram, depicts El Lissitzky, looking fixidly forward, while his right eye seems to look through the center of his open palm. The same hand balances a compass over one of his graphic works, partially depicted, on the left side of the frame. The work conveys the unity of artistic vision and execution and suggests the artist is both the constructor of his work and is constructed by it. -
Massenpsychose (Mass Psychosis) Artist: László Moholy-Nagy
Making this image while he was teaching at the Bauhaus (between 1923 and 1928), Moholy-Nagy called his photomontages "photoplastics" and defined them as "a compressed interpenetration of visual and verbal wit". Influenced by the Dadaists (he made his first photomontages while sharing a studio with Kurt Schwitters in the early 1920s) Moholy-Nagy has placed his figures, cut from magazines, within a Constructivist schema. -
Herbert Bayer, The Lonely Metropolitan
Herbert Bayer studied at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1928, and then worked in Berlin for his own design firm. From about 1931 Bayer started to make a series of well-known seamless photomontages such as: "Language of Letters" (1931); "Bone Breaker" (1931) "Self Portrait In A Mirror" (1932); and "The Lonely Metropolitan "(1932). -
John Heartfield Adolf the Übermensch: Swallows gold and spouts junk
This photomontage, published in the year that Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany, depicts Hitler delivering one of his heated speeches. Combined with an x-ray image revealing the ribs and oesophagus filled with gold coins, the portrait blatantly attacks the Nazi leader's hollow rhetoric.
The famous left-wing playwright Berthold Brecht called Heartfield "one of the most important European artists [who had] created himself, the field of photomontage". -
Surrealist photomontage: Dora Maar - Hand/Shell
This Surrealist photomontage incorporates elements of fashion photography, as the high finish of the image and its lighting suggest a glamour shot, enhanced by the shell's spiraling pattern, and the graceful curve of the well-manicured hand. Unlike most artists who employed photomontage, Maar did not source clippings from publications, but used rather only her own photographs. The result was images that seem to be a real shot of an impossible dream-like scenario. -
Dora Maar, Le simulateur
Simple two-picture photomontage by Dora Marr (1907-1997). Upside-down photograph of a sewer interior, with the boy pasted onto it. -
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Socio-political commentary in Pop Art
Throughout the 1950s and '60s, various Pop artists in Britain and the United States steered Dadaist and Surrealist photomontage techniques away from haunting, psychological content towards socio-political commentary. As post-war, capitalist society became infiltrated with consumerist advertising, artists were given a whole new playground of visual matter to subvert and upend. -
POP ART, Richard Hamilton, Just What Is It That Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?
Hamilton's photomontage, featuring found images of comic books, pin-ups and various consumer durables, pre-empted many of American Pop Art's most enduring motifs. Hamilton, and others including Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake, turned their inquisitive (envious?) gaze to America's abundant consumer culture and used the marketing language of post-War Americana to produce new and irreverent images using collage and photomontage. -
Peter Blake, Sgt Pepper, The Beatles
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is the eighth studio album by the English rock band the Beatles. Released on 26 May 1967, Sgt. -
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Photomontage rediscovered
The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album (1967) featured on the front cover the "People We Like" photomontage by Peter Blake, bringing photomontage to millions.
Terry Gilliam's surreal cut-out animations appeared on British TV from 1967-1974, most famously in Monty Python, and these frequently used Victorian and Edwardian photography and engravings. -
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The political 1980s in the UK
Following Linder's photomontage for the Buzzcocks and others, there was a short period when British political photomontage was an active form, in the hands of Peter Kennard and the crudely grotesque 'photocopied posters' artists associated with Class War and the Anticopyright Network. Although, for the most part, the range of output was known only to anarchists and anti-nuclear campaigners until the works were collected in book form. -
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Contemporary Photomontage
Throughout the 1970s and '80s postmodernist era photomontage techniques became popular as a form of pastiche or political protest, while today, photomontage techniques are continuously updated by contemporary artists in surprising and unexpected ways. Some update images from the past with traditional techniques, such as John Stezaker, who explores elegant, absurd combinations of found imagery with a cut and paste method lifted from the Dada handbook. -
Martha Rosler, Red Stripe Kitchen
Produced at the height of the war in Vietnam, this somewhat incredulous photomontage combines an image of a high-tech kitchen with images of two soldiers surveying the ground as they search for explosives. Rosler's innovative photomontage functions on several levels, challenging the viewer to consider the relationship between consumer society, gender and class stratification, and the military industrial complex. -
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Early British Photography re-discovered
From around 1972, a long scholarly effort began to recover and properly publish early photography. In Britain, this was only able to succeed due to the opening up of major archives such as the Royal Photographic Society from the early 1970s, and access to the 300,000 photographs at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London from the mid 1970s. The pictures, often stripped of much original context, could look strange and other-worldly. -
John Stezaker, The Oath
In 1976 Stezaker pioneered the use of film stills to create photomontages, though he prefers to call his work "collage," as he said, "I've always made a distinction between collage and photomontage. Montage is about producing something seamless and legible, where collage is about interrupting the seam and making something illegible". -
Peter Kennard, Haywain with Cruise Missiles
In the years between the end of the Second World War and the start of the Cold War, photomontage fell out of favor with a public tiring of imagery that seems positively bland when compared to the new wonders of television. Photomontage underwent a revival during the 1980s and the rise of the CND movement. Photomontage served a practical purpose at it adorned banners designed to be waved during demonstrations. -
David Hockney,Pearblossom Hwy.11 - 18th April 1986
In the 1980s, Hockney began making what he called "joiners," photomontages composed of multiple Polaroid prints (he later made them with multiple photographs). Rather than merging into a seamless composite, the joiners become a patchwork; a kind of Cubist work that for Hockney conveyed how human vision actually worked. -
Barbara Kruger, Your body is a battleground
When she began making photomontages in the early 1980s, Kruger's signature style - white text on a red background combined with a black and white image from mass media publications - drew upon her previous experience as a graphic designer and picture editor for various Condé Nast publications -
Jeff Wall, A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai)
Originally trained as a painter, Wall began to work on various film projects in the early 1970s. In 1977 he pioneered a new form of art, using a light box to display large photographic transparencies, which he described as "the perfect synthetic technology". As he said, "It was not photography, it was not cinema, it was not painting, it was not propaganda, but it has strong associations with them all". -
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Digital era
Started with the creation of Photoshop in 1993. With the technology improvements, there are many possibilities for creating photomontages for different purposes. -
Micheal Harp Warped Victorians
Micheal Harp uses public domain photographs from the Victorian and Edwardian eras, transforming them in Photoshop into comical/macabre figures from a Poe-esque and Lovecraft-ian parallel universe. -
Oscar Guzman The City of Galvez
The City of Galvez is a 16-image photmontaged series that premiered on the ZoneZero photography website in early 2006. Guzman's mythical city is perhaps also influenced by the cities found in fantastic fiction such as Calvino and Borges. His city is inhabited by bowler-hatted men in suits, which seems to be a nod toward the paintings of Magritte, and the look of the city itself a nod toward Gaudi. -
Lorna Simpson, Riunite & Ice #20
A leading conceptual photographer since the 1980s, Simpson's photomontages combined the medium with painting, as seen here in the black and white smoke that fills an inverted triangle created by the placement of the images. In her 2018 installation Unanswerable, which contained over forty photomontages, Simpson described her inclusion of natural elements as symbolizing the forces filling the gap of Black history.