PHOTOMONTAGEMEDIA CULTURES

Man with a Movie Camera film posters . Designed by Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg (1929).

El Lissitzky The Constructor Photomontage 1924

Borrowing from two Russian art movements, Suprematism and Constructivism, both of which favoured abstract geometric shapes in unshaded colours, Lissitzky superimposed an image of himself on a piece of graph paper, and layered on top a picture of his hand,

uniting hand and eye in a symbol of ideal labour. Superimposing one image on another recalled the experiments of Cubism .

El Lissitzky Runner in the City Photomontage 1926

El Lissitzky exhibition poster 1929

El Lissitzky Study for Cover Photomontage 1929-30

PhotomontageSoviet and German experimental photography developed at the same time, and practitioners vigorously

exchanged ideas. Photomontage originated in Germany, but was adopted in Russia soon after World War 1.The avant-garde Dada movement, initiated by artists who took refuge in Switzerland during the war, spread to

Berlin, and from there to Moscow. Experimental artists cut pictures from magazines and newspapers and pasted them together in composite images whose jumbled scale and perspective challenged conventional expectations.

The Berlin Dadaist Hausmann wrote that the group agreed on the term ‘photomontage’ as opposed to photocollage because of “our aversion at playing the artist and thinking instead of ourselves as engineers”.

The jumbled appearance of photomontage was more than formal inventiveness: it was a token of the quick changes and disruptions of modern life that seemed, in the period immediately after World War 1 and the Russian

Revolution, to promise progressive social change.

Max Ernst Health Through Sport 1920 Raoul Haussmann Dada Conquers 1920

Raoul Hausmann Tatlin at Home 1920

Claude Cahun ( born Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob) I.O.U. (Self Pride),1929 & H.U.M. Photomontage,1929-30

Hannah Hoch Tamer (Dompteuse) 1930 Foreign Beauty 1929

Hannah Höch German Girl 1930 English Dancer 1928

John Heartfeld, cover for AIZ , 1934, anti-Nazi propaganda poster,1935. “Adolph the Superman: swallows gold and talks tin”

John Heartfeld anti-Nazi propaganda poster 1935 “Oh German evergreen, how crooked are your branches”

John Heartfeld photomontage for the “Unity of anti-fascist action” Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung 1934

Herbert Bayer Self-Portrait 1932 Lonesome Big City Dweller 1932