By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. Throughout this book, we use the term photomontage rather than collage or photocollage.
The term was associated with the German word montleren to assemble, or fit , which the Berlin Dadaists used to describe their piecing together of photo graphic and typographic sources, usually cut from the printed mass media. They enjoyed the mechanical-and prole tarian-connotations associated with the term and used it to distinguish their work from Cubist collages, or papiers colles, whose formalist abstraction they considered a dead end.
For most of her life, Hannah Hoch consistently used the term photomontage to describe her work, although early on she also used Klebebild glued picture or Klebezeichnung glued drawing. Subsequent to the Dada period, the term photomontage has often come to have a more restricted meaning: a seamless, composite image achieved either by manipulating negatives in the darkroom or rephotographing a collage of photographs, techniques favored by such disparate artists as John Heartfield and the Russian Constructivists, on the one hand, and the Surrealists, on the other.
Hoch never engaged in such photographic artifice other than in an occasional double-exposure self-portrait , preferring to accept the evidence of hand cutting over the creation of seamless illusion or the mass-production of images.
In employing the term photomontage, we are, therefore, seeking to restore its original usage and to remain consistent with Hannah Hoch's own language. A Note on the Dating of Hoch's Photomontages Until the s, Hoch frequently did not date her photomontages at all, or did so only years after she made them, at times using ball-point pen a post-World War II invention to annotate pieces in the tremulous hand of her old age.
