PHOTOMONTAGE AND COLLAGE

For this exercise you are going to make a montage or collage with a political message. Your subject matter could be a current issue, or something that you feel strongly about such as animal rights, the treatment of elderly people in hospital or images of women in the media. Collect images from newspapers, magazines, your own photographs or images online. Do remember that some images may be copyright – particularly anything associated with commercial companies or organisations. Create new meanings out of these extant images by juxtaposing and contrasting them. Be imaginative, playful, provocative or humourous. If you have access to a scanner, then scan in your found images and create collages or photomontages with Photoshop. Try working with layers; exploring a variety of selection tools, such as your magic wand or magnetic lasso; utilising the cutting and pasting options – try and learn the keyboard shortcuts for these; adjusting the contrast, colour and balance of your images; and resizing elements of your photomontages. Make sure you keep your original psd photoshop file with all your layers intact and export a jpg image with your layers flattened for the final piece of artwork. In your learning log reflect on the original meaning of the images and your subsequent collage. Write a short evaluative statement.

Analysis

Create a montage or collage with a political message or issues you feel passionately or strongly about. The images can come from newspapers and magazines as well as online. Create a new meaning from the images that I have collected by contrasting and juxtaposing the images. In Adobe Photoshop try working with layers and a selection of tools like magnetic lasso tool.

Keywords

Montage

Collage

Message

Images

Newspapers

Magazines

Photographs

Online

Juxtaposing

Layers

Photoshop

Lasso tools

Moodboard

I choose GBV (Gender Based Violence) as it seems to be endemic in South Africa. My moodboard contains photos of abused women, newspaper cuttings and headlines, hands to signify "stop", x-ray images to show the extent of the abuse and advertising from major retailers. I collected everything I have from newspapers, online and photos that represented GBV. I wanted to highlight this issue as it seems to be in the news every single day, reported on yet nothing seems to change.

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Brainstorming

Sketchbook ideas

Please click on the image below for more sketchbook pages

What is Dada? Art Movements & Styles

The avant-garde movement Dada emerged during the First World War as a reaction to the horrors of war. It was primarily a literary and artistic movement, and its most famous members were Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia.

French-born Picabia, influenced by Marcel Duchamp and the enthusiasm for mechanisation in America, worked in a number of styles and was never afraid to court unconventionality.

Dada continued to spread after the war, with groups in Paris and Berlin, including Georg Grosz and Hannah Höch. Höch's work combines political commentary, gender issues, questions of modernity and a critique of the bourgeoisie.

In the early 1920s, many Dada artists converged in Paris, where Andre Breton and others began to formulate the ideas that would become Surrealism. Dada's radical ideas reached beyond the visual arts and into music.

Dadaism was an anti-art movement that rejected the styles and sensibilities of the day and concerned itself with the absence of meaning. (National Galleries Scotland,2019)

Information above was summarised from the online line video below.

Artist Research

Hannah Höch

Her provocative photomontage compositions made her the only woman associated with the Berlin Dada group (1889-1978). Below is a podcast on her journey.

“Most of our male colleagues continued for a long while to look upon us as charming and gifted amateurs, denying us implicitly any real professional status.” Hannah Höch

Click on the image below to follow on Google Arts and Culture Hannah Höch's work.

Fig.1 Klage (l'urlo) (1930)

Some more of Hannah Höch's work.

Fig.2 Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany, (1919)

Fig.3 Study for Man and Machine (1921)

Fig.4 Strauss (1965)

Fig.5 Untitled -From an Ethnographic Museum (1930)

Martha Rosler

House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home 1967–72

The concept for the work House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home emerged at a time when US military involvement in Vietnam was increasing. By combining images of Vietnamese citizens who were injured during the war published in Life magazine, with those of the houses of wealthy Americans taken from House Beautiful, she gave literal meaning to the term "living-room war." Through television reports, news of ongoing carnage in Southeast Asia reached tranquil American homes. These activist photomontages reveal how media images shape the collective experience of war by challenging viewers to rethink where they are, and where they are heading. This is from a global perspective. (Rosler, 2022)

See images below

Fig.6 Red Stripe Kitchen, 1967-72.

Fig.7 Cleaning the Drapes (from the series House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home (1967-1972)

Fig.8 Balloons, (1967-72)

John Heartfield

John Heartfield is synonymous with anti-fascist photomontage from the 1930s. Opposed to the propaganda of big industry, he became known for his one-on-one battle with Hitler.

The art of collage was a vernacular art form, readily adapted for propaganda and commercial purposes. Photomontage was used by the Berlin Dadaists to fragment reality in order to rupture the commercialized media's view of reality (Evans, 1992).