Photo-montage

It 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 a final image may appear as a seamless photographic print. Photo-montage is often used as a means of expressing political dissent.It was first used as a technique by the dadaists in 1915 in their protests against the First World War. It was later adopted by the surrealists who exploited the possibilities photo-montage offered by using free association to bring together widely disparate images, to reflect the workings of the unconscious mind. In 1923 the Russian  constructionist Aleksander Rodchenko began experimenting with photo-montage as a way of creating striking socially engaged imagery concerned with the placement and movement of objects in space.Other key exponents of the medium are  ,John Heartfield the German artist who reconstructed images from the media to protest against Germany’s Fascist regime and Peter Kennard; whose photo-montages explored issues such as economic inequality, police brutality and the nuclear arms race between the 1970s and the 1990s.

20th Century Photo-Montages