Stezakers’ works focus on photo montage to give old images a new meaning and add a creative surrealistic tinge to his photography.
He focuses on the similarities of structural and compositional elements of an image and stitches them together in a seamless yet surreal fashion. For example in the below image he uses the structure of the cliff faces and relates them to the structure of the subjects faces in the background.
This image has quite a flat, monochromatic style which almost gives it a warm balance, soft texture and comfortable feel. The montaging of the cliff faces is visually appealing as it is framed in the centre of the image. The two layers to the image each have their own depth which creates this double up of depth in the image and the eye has a lot of elements to look at which would give it a chaotic composition however because of the montaging the additional layer fits seamlessly within the background which cancels out this chaos and rather satisfies the composition.
My response to Stezakers’ work:
John StezakerMichael KenealyJohn StezakerMichael Kenealy
Photo-montage is a photographic/art technique where two or more images are overlapped and rearranged together to create a brand new image. In 1916, John Heartfield and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together to promote anti-Nazi and anti-fascist statements, this resulted in the photo-montage art technique. Photo-montage is often used as a means of expressing political dissent, it was initially used in 1915 by Dadaists in their protests against the First World War. The term “photo-montage” became widely known at the end of World War 1, around 1918 or 1919, and was used between a wide variety of art forms. For example, the Surrealists adopted the photo-montage technique due to it’s ability to bring together various different images to create an abstract representation of the workings of the unconscious mind. Recently, photo-montage has been used in psychedelic art by contemporary artists and photographers to reflect political messages, about topics such as climate change, in a visual way that is easy to understand yet also very impactful.
Photo-Montage Mood Board
Hannah Höch
Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was a German Dada artist known for her incisively political collages and photo-montages, a form she helped pioneer. Hannah Höch appropriated and recombined images and text from mass media to critique popular culture, the failings of the Weimar Republic, and the socially constructed roles of women. In 1917, Höch became associated with the Berlin Dada Group, which was a group of primarily male artists who critiqued and mocked German society and culture post World War 1. Her photo-montages received critical acclaim even with her male peers patronizing views, which still restricted women from having any real professional status from being depicted as ‘amateurs’.
Höch created her brilliant photo-montages by cutting out images from popular magazines and illustrated journals and layering them together to form impactful political pieces. The main themes Höch explored in her work were based around gender and identity, she humorously criticized Weimar Germany’s concept of the ‘New Woman’ who was allegedly man’s equal. Much of her work included feminist symbols and rebellious ideas that went against societies norms, she was extremely influential throughout her life and her work still impacts the world/societies views today.
Image Analysis
Hannah Höch | Indian Dancer | From an Ethnographic Museum | 1930
This photo-montage created by Hannah Höch is an extremely strong example of her political, revolutionary ideas about societies views on women. Her collaged model is the actress Renée Falconetti, appearing in a publicity still for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 film The Passion of Joan of Arc. Firstly, by Höch using such a famous face as the subject of her piece, it symbolizes that the patriarchal society she lived in shunned women of all professions and classes, even famous actresses. The composition of this piece shows half of Falconetti’s face is replaced with the ear, eye, and mouth of a wooden dance mask from Cameroon. I believe this choice of layering pieces of a mask over the subject’s face symbolizes how most ideas and suggestions from women were masked over and covered up for men to take the credit in Höch’s society. It signifies the expectations and assumptions that men had about women, to be hidden away and silenced for their controversial ideas. I really like the way Höch mocks this in her piece as she presents the masking of women as physical, not mental. Above her head rests a crown of cutlery; cut-out shapes of spoons and knives, set against glinting metallic foil. This choice clearly represents the status of women in contemporary German society, painting the model as a goddess of domestic finery by using such mundane kitchen utensils ridicules the common trivial phrase ‘a woman’s place is the kitchen’.
Technically the photo-montage holds little notable photographic techniques, however Höch’s choice of subject image has clear harsh lighting due to the bold shadow formed under her chin. The main highlights fall across the cut-out shapes of cutlery above her head which create a considerable tonal range and contrast between light and dark. This gives the impression that ideas closer to a woman’s heart were shadowed and hidden away from society, whereas the views placed in their head- about women’s role in civilization being only to provide for their husband’s- were publicized and highlighted. Furthermore, the repetition of the cutlery shapes connotes the idea that these concepts on women have been around for generations, Höch clearly believed they would continue if people didn’t start making a change to the way society ignored and disrespected women. Additionally, the plain blue-grey background, along with the overall dull colour palette of this piece, provides a clear link to Höch’s perspective on the community’s minds being blank towards the discrimination of women and their identities.
Photoshoot Plan
Who – I plan on photographing my friends Caitlin, Mai and Lauren for this photo-montage shoot due to their confidence in front of the camera. Additionally, all three girls have different looks and styles which will help portray my ideas about the triviality of society’s beauty standards.
What – I will capture images of my models in front of a black backdrop, looking straight at the camera lens with quite a blank facial expression. I then plan on gathering some images of celebrities and models from fashion magazines and cutting out certain facial features to layer over my primary images.
Where – I will conduct this photoshoot in the school’s art dry room, due to the photography studio being currently used as a drama classroom and therefore out of use.
How – I will take these images using the 1 point lighting technique with a standing LED soft box light to create a clear focal point on my subject’s face as well as a very dark black background to help it stand out, I also plan on capturing these images as mid-shots/head-shots.
Why – My aim in producing this photoshoot is to portray the effects modern media has on women’s perception of their faces and bodies, I wish to show how media’s constant flaunting of artificial women can have an effect on what society believes is the beauty standard they should conform to.
Contact Sheets
Selected Images
Photo-Montages
I created these photo-montages to highlight the effect modern media, such as magazines, has on women’s perception of themselves. I wanted to create the impression that the media’s constant portrayal of superficial women has influenced society’s expectations of ‘the perfect woman’, similar to the work of Hannah Hoch. I cut out features such as model’s eyes to layer over my portraits, connoting the common concept that girls with brown eyes want blue eyes and girls with blue eyes want brown etc; showing that nobody ever thinks they’re perfect, even when somebody else does. However, I decided I wanted to emphasise my subject’s lips also, so I cut out magazine model’s lips that were considerably bigger than my model’s to create this exaggerated effect. I believe this demonstrates the unrealistic expectations that all women must have big pouty lips to be beautiful, as modern media suggests with their excessive flaunting of them. Furthermore, as well as cutting out facial features from these popular magazines, I also found words and phrases that showed what women are compared to what their perceived to be. For example, in my first photo-montage I cut out the phrase ‘she performed’ to imply that women sometimes have to put up a façade in order to be heard or get their point across. Nevertheless, I paired this phrase with the words ‘loud mouth’ as it suggests women will get criticized for trying to voice their opinion in a society that is not open to their new ideas, linking to Hoch’s work on a woman’s place in society. Additionally, I cut out phrases such as ‘glowing skin’, ‘beauty’ and different well-known brands to show the things that the media believes women want, the things that this modern society thrive off of. Lastly, I chose to stick several model’s eyes around my subject’s head in order to demonstrate the idea that because of the world’s constant changing trends and styles, women may believe that society is always watching them and that the eyes of the people around them are consistently picking out their flaws and imperfections, clearly showing how modern media can influence are thoughts about ourselves.
To edit the first image, I recreated John Stazaker’s method of layering images from vintage actress portraits, however I incorporated my own photography by taking portraits I took for the diamond cameo photoshoot.
For the second image, I attempted to recreate Stezaker’s common use of layering landscapes and portraits, so I used my own photos from my abstract and portrait photoshoots to recreate this.
For my last edit, I noticed Stezaker often crops and layers multiple images to distort the portrait’s original identity. Here I used my environmental portraits project and diamond cameo project to layer over one-another, and cut out some shapes similar to that in the work of John Stezaker.
Photomontage is the process of copying, pasting and layering multiple photographs onto one photograph in order to create a new image. This can be done physically, for example printing and cutting, or digitally on photoshop. This process is typically done with portrait images to create an almost warped piece of art.
Examples of photomontage
“The Art Critic” – Raoul Hausmann (1919-1920)
“Cut With Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimer Beer Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany” – Hannah Hoch (1919)
“Marriage I” – John Stezaker (2006)
John Stezaker
“Marriage XV” – John Stezaker (2006)
John Stezaker is a British conceptual artist born in 1949. Stezaker attended the Slade School of Art in London when he was in his early teens, and graduated with a Higher Diploma in Fine Art in 1973. He was best known for his work in photocollage, where he would take existing images from postcards, film stills, etc. in order to create juxtaposing artworks. John Stezaker was widely recognised for his photocollage series, “Marriage”, where he layered portraits of vintage movie stars to create a disjointed image for the viewer. Stezaker has had his work featured in exhibitions in The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and many more. Until 2006, Stezaker tutored in Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art in London, until he retired.
Examples of John Stezaker’s work
“Mask XIV” – John Stezaker (2006)
“Kiss II” – John Stezaker (1978)
“Double Shadow II” – John Stezaker (2014)
Analysis of John Stezaker’s work
“Mother Night” – John Stezaker (2018)
This photograph, created by John Stezaker, is titled ‘Mother Night’. This piece of work companions another labelled ‘Father Sky’, which were part of Stezaker’s ‘Dark Star’ series. In these portraits, vintage film stars were photographed against studio backdrops sometimes involving illusionistic pictorial grounds.
The lightest part of the image can be found in the highlight of the actor’s face, especially seen in the forehead and around the eyes. The darkest areas are seen in the outlined figure-shapes night landscape, however the darkness is contrasted with the tiny dots of light seen in the stars of the scene or in the lit windows. In the portrait itself, it is most likely lit using hard, artificial lighting as the portraits are taken in a studio and have harsh highlights.
The outline of the night sky create a contrast between tones and colours as the darkness juxtaposes the light. It also provides a contrast in direction, as the two figures face different angles. There is also contrasting straight-edged lines that are found in the buildings of the night scene.
There is no use of repetition in this photograph, however there is a sense of reflection within the water of the night scene, as the stars and artificially lit buildings reflect against the water in rippled motions.
The majority of the shapes in this photograph are organic and curved, however these are contrasted against the geometric, straight-edged lines that are seen in the buildings of the night scene.
There is little example of depth within this photograph, although it can still be seen. For example the shadows and highlights in the actors face prove a sense of depth, and also the houses in the night scene slowly fade into the background creates a sense of depth that is still quite shallow. The solid background behind the actor lacks depth as it is a negative space. The night sky also contains a lot of negative space in the top thirds of this scene, however this is contradicted by the stars in the sky.
There is juxtaposing textures within this image, especially in the night scene. For example, the rippling water creates a smoother texture, whereas the brick house and cobbled roads create a rougher texture.
There is a large range of tones in this image from dark to light. The lightest tones can be seen in the highlights of the face of the actor as well as both artificial and natural lighting in the night scene. The darkest tones can be seen in the dull mountains in the background of the night scene, and the sky in the night scene also. Overall, the image tends towards darkness, as the night sky section of the image takes up a large amount of empty space with the photograph it has been layered over.
There is a range of both vibrant and muted colours within this piece by John Stezaker. The saturated red of the background portrait contrasts with the more dulled tones of the skin from the portrait. These colours are then juxtaposed again by the sombre tones of the night scene positioned over the models face. The dark blues and blacks of the night scene create an eerie atmosphere when placed against the vivid red.
The composition if the image appears to be somewhat balanced as the two silhouettes in their own tones are roughly the same size but are angled in different directions. There is also a fair balance between the light and dark tones which adds another element of balance. The rule of thirds is not used in this instance as there is no geometrical shapes that can be superimposed into this image which can be said to make the understanding of the composition difficult.
A photo. Montage is the process of making a composite photograph by cutting out segments of an image and rearranging them and gluing them once they are rearranged or oven overlapping two or more photographs into one new image.
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.
Photo montaging is an artistic technique were two or more images are combined to make a new composition.
This technique gained attention in the early 20th century were artists would use it to make political statements around WWI and WWII. Below is one of Raoul Hausman’s pieces were he explores the political aura around WWII.
Raoul Hausman
Hannah Hoch
Hannah Hoch is one of the originators of Photomontage.
She was a part of the Dada art movement which was a part of the European avant-garde movement in the early 20th century.
Her work focused on evoking thought and bringing light to social issues in the early 20th century. Her work acted as an aid to feminism movements of the time.
Hannah Hoch
Her work is surreal and colourful. It includes an abundance of montaging in creative ways where certain human features will be used to form something else. The use of facial features being woven together is a way of challenging the identity and the dichotomy of female power.
Her pieces are given context and validity through her method of extracting segments from popular media to use in her montages.
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. It is often used as a way of expressing political disagreement. It was first used as a technique by the Dadaists in 1915 in their protests against the First World War. It was later used by the surrealists who explored the possibilities of photomontage by using it to bring together widely contrasting images, in order to reflect the workings of the unconscious mind. In 1923, the Russian constructivist Aleksander Rodchenko began experimenting with photomontage as a way of creating socially engaged imagery exploring the placement and movement of objects in space. Other artists who have used this technique are John Heartfield, the German artist who reconstructed images from the media to protest against Germany’s Fascist regime and Peter Kennard; whose photomontages explored issues such as economic inequality, police brutality and the nuclear arms race between the 1970s and the 1990s.
JOHN STEZAKER
John Stezaker ( 1949 – ), is a British conceptual artist. His work is surreal in tone and is often made using collage and the appropriation of pre-existing images such as postcards, film stills, and publicity photographs. Art historian Julian Stallabrass said, “The contrast at the heart of these works [by Stezaker] is not between represented and real, but between the unknowing primitives of popular culture, and the conscious, ironic artist and viewer of post-modern images.” One work included in an exhibition at Salama-Caro Gallery, London, in 1991, depicted an image of a punch clock together with the caption “Why Spend Time on an Exhibition Like This?”.
