![]() ![]() Their context was not photography, but fine arts in the strictest sense. The Dada photomonteurs, however, most likely had no idea of this earlier tradition. For commercial and esthetic reasons, for propaganda, or just for the love of visual play, photomontage formed an extensive part of the photographic vocabulary for nearly three-quarters of a century before Dada. Beginning in the early 1850s, photographers relied increasingly on combination prints, cut and pasted assemblages, multiple exposures and similar synthetic or “nonphotographic” devices. And it seems to have existed in some force. There is ample evidence from the history of photography that photomontage existed well before its purported invention around 1918–1920. Photomontage’s lineage is normally traced to Dada, which, by 1921, was no longer around, although its spirit of irreverence and caprice lingered on considerably. The planar, flattened space of Cubism, the chaotic velocity of forms in Futurism, the confluent structures of Vorticism, led stylistically to the first photomontages. ![]() The customary argument has been that the kinds of pictures created during the period just prior to World War I issued in a new style of art and a new kind of pictorial value. Most historians, critics and even the artists themselves have usually considered this type of imagery as spawned by early 20th-century modernism in art. Photomontage has been a thoroughly modern technique of making pictures. Photomontage is the creation of pictures from other pictures. Always at the heart of photomontage, however, is the use of multiple pictures to make up another single picture. Thus independent pictures could be cut out and pasted down or printed sequentially on a single sheet of paper or exposed multiply in negative or printed multiply in combination on a sheet of paper. Photomontage has also been utilized by picture-makers for strict, formal reasons to create images which are in no way naturalistic and have no grounding in fantasy, but present a diversity of photographs of various subjects for the sake of assemblage and/or amalgamation. Just as readily, photomontage has been brought into play in the service of pure whimsy, with themes too fanciful to be photographed directly. Frequently it has been used to surmount technical or mere physical limitations to produce a photographic image that is visually unified and more or less naturalistic and convincing as a “facsimile” of its ostensible subject. Sometimes photomontage is coupled with hand drawing or with typographic forms. THE MOST BASIC CHARACTERISTIC of photomontage is the joining of two or more individual photographic images, as parts, to form another complete, different image. ![]()
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