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Photomontage • From the earliest days of coinage and use by the Dadaists, photomontage has been associated with mixed signifying modes including printed and hand-written fragments of text (letters, journal entries, newspaper headlines and columns, advertisements, packaging, instructions, posters and fliers). RaoulHausmannAustrian, 1886–1971DerKunstreporter (The Art Critic), 1919–1920photomontage and collage with ink stamp and crayon on printed poster poem
Photomontage • Dada "photomontages" were frequently the scissors and paste of collage. John Heartfield Goering, The Executioner of the Third Reich
John Heartfield Much of Heartfield's career was spent declaring his opposition to Hitler and the Nazi Regime. As in the Middle Ages...So in the Third Reich. May 31, 1934 This piece shows humanity, broken on the wheel. It mirrors the traditional piece with a reference to the swastika, the Third Reich breaking human life.
John Heartfield Goebbel's Response October, 1935This image shows Goebbel's solution for ending the food shortage in Germany. It was featured in Berlin's Arbeiter-Illustriect-Zerlung (AIZ)(Workers Illustrated Newspaper) as a political satire. The caption reads: "What? No butter or lard? Well then, eat your Jews?" This demonstrates the German leader's general view of the Jews. They are seen as expendable if the rest of Germany is at stake. Why go hungry when we can eat those who's lives have no value.
John Heartfield Hurrah, the Butter is All Gone! December 19, 1935 This image represents the importance of Germany’s military and weapons; more important than the citizens who need food. Instead, eat the iron.
John Heartfield And yet it moves! 1943 This piece refers to a remark made by Galileo when he was forced to deny his belief that the Earth moved around the sun. Upon his release from the Inquisition, he stamped the Earth with his foot and said, "And yet it moves." This image shows that despite Hitler's terror, the world survived.
Photomontage • Photomontage produces a single photographic (or photo-digital) image from multiple negatives, scans, or layers; the stack of layers may or may not include images of texts.
Inversion and Solarization Another process that alters shading and edges is Inversion (or "Negative"), in which all the color values switch sign, as it were, with perfect neutral gray being 0. That is, the darkest become the lightest, hues become their complements.
Horizon and Perspective Space In some cases, tension between perspective spaces can be very productive, where the camera is rotated 90 degrees from portrait to landscape orientation (and taken a few floors up).
Reduced opacity The common-sense lore about ghosts, visions, apparitions, and dream figures is that their insubstantiality is related to reduced opacity. All of these manifestations are assumed to belong to the inward world of individuals. Solid things are what everyone sees--what you and perhaps you alone see is less publicly seeable, hence less opaque.
Reduced opacity The figure of a reduced person (or head of person) against a fully opaque background was very attractive to Edmund Teske, who made many and many of these with an individual's head, usually a woman, or body (often a man) superimposed over a piece of landscape.
Reduced opacity This image illustrates a prize-winning story in the Sierra Club Nature Writing Competition about the floods in California in 1997. The semi-transparent figure as the woman author writing out of her experience of the flood and the scene as it was experienced by her and conveyed in the story. Background and foreground are very close to merging; in fact, it is hard to say what exactly the foreground is.
Reduced opacity Finally, the entire image can represent something imagined. These are Tarot cards in Madame S's deck. Several of them are unbalanced and seem to spiral out of the frame, creating an aura of carnivalesque disarray that is wonderfully suited to the poem. The lower background has a photographic image of ships plying a harbor from about the period of the poem. Here, said she,Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)
Identity The fluid merging and fusion of these composite, layered graphics still carries with it the connotations of the psychological, and when the point of merging is a face or eye, the suggestion is strong that some sort of identity is being asserted. We might imagine the woman saying "In me as a part or alternative self or demon is a wolf"
Identity The seamstress at work is foreground, perhaps reflecting the relative anonymity of her work product? “These are all parts of my identity" Alice Lex-Nerlinger: "Seamstress" (1930)
Photo Illustration Photo Illustration: A type of computer art that begins with a digitized photograph. Using special image enhancement software, the artist can then apply a variety of special effects to transform the photo into a work of art. Diane Fenster: High School Sports Hazing
Photo Illustration We might suppose it to be a "theme setting" image for an article. The soft focus and softly shadowed, expressionless face and eyes suggest one with opiates in her bloodstream, especially in contrast to the syringe which is in foreground and hard focus: the syringe is what is real. Catherine McIntyre: Opiates
Photo Illustration The "Family Tree" and it occurs in the context of a treatment of Alzheimer's disease and its inheritance. It is a fatal tree, though it is the tree of their lives as well. It neither celebrates (as a spirit photograph would) nor bemoans the portion allotted the family.
Photo Illustration This illustration of "multiple personality" is equally straightforward, indeed, almost hackneyed in its three heads in one body image.
Layers • Layered image (s) should demonstrate reflections and/or Opacity changes • Layers should indicate the a softened edge when appropriate and the use of gradients .
Reflections Reflections provide a school for seeing partially transparent images of objects, but the image we see is a virtual one; the object which is being reflected is behind us (in most cases) and facing the reflecting glass rather than facing us.
Photomontage • Reduced opacity links to subjective seeing. • Soft outline links to identity of thing and person. • Perspective space links to representation of objects in a world like our own. • Stacked planes link to history and process
Photomontage Requirements • A minimum of 5 images, text, layers not including the background image. • Photographs cannot be downloaded from the internet. All Photographs used must be original work, photos taken by you or old photographs that have been scanned by you. • The Montage must have a message, meaning or statement about you, your school, community, national events, or world events..
