Man Ray was an American visual artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. (Wikipedia) Above is a multi exposure piece by him which I will be basing my image on.
To get started I repeated the same steps as when I made my double exposure image on another blog, but I then turned the opacity right up, rather than leaving the layers at half opacity. I left the background as it was but then for the extra additions on the left and right, I doubled the cut-outs, turned the opacity down on the copy and placed it slightly off to create a sense of motion blur. Finally I turned the image black and whit and increased the contrast slightly.
This is how it turned out. However, to complete this image I cropped it similarly to Man Ray’s.
Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. He experimented with photographic collages. Around 1923, Raoul would create montages of cut outs of magazines locally and stick them together. He believed war at the time to be a necessary cleansing of a calcified society. He would find portrait of soldiers, onto which he had glued photographic portrait heads of his son five times. Some would say he’s mentally unstable to the fact that he agreed with war. His feelings towards war and that time or era seemed to be all expressed into his art pieces.
Mood Board –
Photo Analysis –
Art piece by Raoul Hausmann – 1919
This image was probably anonymous figures cut from a magazine. Raoul’s work seemed to have a meaning behind why exactly he made this photomontages. As he believed war was a cleansing of a calcified society, using soldiers bodies from a poster or magazine and sticking others heads to it might suggest that he feels as if we should fight for ourselves, fight for rights. The fragment of a German banknote behind the neck of the anonymous figure suggests that he is controlled by capitalist forces. This is because German were invading berlin , where Raoul is from, and taking over the country. The words in the background are part of a poem poster made by Hausmann to be pasted on the walls of Berlin. As well as montages made he was a poet who sees poems to be an art that can link into his montage work. This is another way for Raoul to express his impressions of the time of the World War 1. This piece of art in particular was made with different materials that were assembled together.
A photo-montage is a collage constructed from photographs. This photographs can be as abstract as can be from each other. Common photo montage creations are portraits such as mixing different parts of models faces with others. Montage photography can be created on photo shop and by hand. Historically, the technique has been used to make political statements and gained popularity in the early 20th century (World War 1-World War 2). 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. This is where photo montage was open to possibilities for expressing the feelings of war soldiers and working communities.
