Photo Montage

uses cut‐up photographs, usually from newspapers, magazines, or other printed sources, which are severed from their original context and juxtaposed with other images, text, and graphic elements, leaving the joins visible. The technique at once references, disrupts, and moves beyond the realism of photographs. It may be done in the darkroom or directly on to the page, although some historians use the term photocollage for the latter. The term is historically associated with Berlin Dada artists, who after the First World War were developing their anti‐art aesthetic by working with mass‐produced imagery rather than painting. They chose the term photomontage for its non‐artistic connotations. A monteur is a mechanic or engineer, and montage means fitting, assembling; it evokes something put together by rivets or solder, as part of an industrial process, rather than with glue, an old and artisan material. It distanced Dada works from Cubist collage, pioneered around 1912 by Picasso and Braque, which consisted of the inclusion of fragments of ‘real’ or simulacral (fake rather than representational) elements into their compositions; but also from 19th‐century uses of combined photographs, such as combination prints (see composite photographs) and amateur photocollages found in albums. The term montage also relates to cinema, in particular the editing techniques of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein, who spliced different takes with no attempt to construct the illusion of a seamless whole or to foster suspension of disbelief. Montage always foregrounds its nature as a re‐presentation, a cultural construction.

Photomontage was used politically by the Berlin Dada artists John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, and Hannah Hoech to question the claim of both photography and language, as used in the press, to represent reality in a truthful and authoritative manner. Photomontage came to be seen as both a product and a visualization of the fragmentation of modern life, its jolting...