page_title: Photomontage
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Photomontage / History
context_page_description: Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that the final image may appear as a seamless physical print. A similar method, although one that does not use film, is realized today through image-editing software. This latter technique is referred to by professionals as "compositing", and in casual usage is often called "photoshopping". A composite of related photographs to extend a view of a single scene or subject would not be labeled as a montage, but instead a stitched image.
context_section_description: Author Oliver Grau in his book, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, notes that the creation of an artificial immersive virtual reality, arising as a result of technical exploitation of new inventions, is a long-standing human practice throughout the ages. Such environments as dioramas were made of composited images.
  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.
  In late Victorian North America, William Notman of Montreal used photomontage to commemorate large social events which could not otherwise be captured on film. Fantasy photomontage postcards were also popular in the late Victorian era and Edwardian era. One of the preeminent producers in this period was the Bamforth & Co Ltd, of Holmfirth, West Yorkshire, and New York. The high point of its popularity came, however, during World War I, when photographers in France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, and Hungary produced a profusion of postcards showing soldiers on one plane and lovers, wives, children, families, or parents on another. Many of the early examples of fine-art photomontage consist of photographed elements superimposed on watercolours, a combination returned to by (e.g.) George Grosz in about 1915.
  In 1916, John Heartfield and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together, a form of art later named "Photomontage.”
  George Grosz wrote, “When John Heartfield and I invented photomontage in my South End studio at five o’clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it.”
  John Heartfield and George Grosz were members of Berlin Club Dada  (1916-1920). The German Dadists were instrumental in making montage into a modern art-form. The term "photomontage” became widely known at the end of World War I, around 1918 or 1919.[5]
  Heartfield used photomontage extensively in his innovative book dust jackets for the Berlin publishing house  Malik-Verlag. He revolutionized the look of these book covers. Heartfield was the first to use photomontage to tell a “story” from the front cover of the book to the back cover. He also employed groundbreaking typography to enhance the effect.
  From 1930-1938, John Heartfield used photomontage to create 240 “Photomontages of The Nazi Period” to use art as a weapon against fascism and The Third Reich. The photomontages appeared on street covers all over Berlin on the cover of the widely circulated AIZ magazine published by Willi Münzenberg, Heartfield lived in Berlin until April, 1933, when he escaped to Czechoslovakia after he was targeted for assassination by the SS. Continuing to produce anti-fascist art in Czechoslovakia until 1938, Heartfield’s political photomontages earned him the number five position on the Gestapo’s Most Wanted List.
  Hannah Höch began experimenting with photomontage in 1918. Höch worked for Ullstein Verlag designing knitting and embroidery patterns that were inspired by her photomontage work of the time. She continued to work with photomontage for almost the rest of her life, even after she broke from the Berlin Dadaists. 
  Other major artists who were members of Berlin Club Dada and major exponents of photomontage were Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann, and Johannes Baader. Individual photographs combined together to create a new subject or visual image proved to be a powerful tool for the Dadists protesting World War I and the interests that they believed inspired the war. Photomontage survived Dada and was a technique inherited and used by European Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí. Its influence also spread to Japan where avant-garde painter Harue Koga produced photomontage-style paintings based on images culled from m
caption: A 1950 photomontage by Grete Stern
exif: {}