Photomontage and the history of its appearance
Photomontage is the procedure and the result of combining several pictures into a single composition. First, the artistic photomontage was performed mechanically: first, the images were cut, and then glued together in the correct sequence.
Nowadays, photomontage is carried out with the help of special computer programs – graphic editors, which allow you to efficiently and quickly process and merge photos. When working with them, a photo montage takes only a few minutes.
The appearance of the first photomontage
Interestingly, the very first composition of the pictures was taken at the dawn of the photo, when the equipment was quite voluminous and caused great inconvenience in operation.
This was done in 1858 by English artist and photographer Henry Robinson. He was able to combine several negatives into a single composition. To create this collage called “Fading” it took 5 different photos.
“Fading”
At the end of the 19th century, images in the spirit of Fantasy photo montage appeared at the peak of popularity. The rise of the genre belongs to the period of the Second World War, when photographers from a number of countries published a cycle of cards with military personnel and their families.
The founders of the photomontage
The main components of the early artistic collages were film photographs and watercolors. Illustrative samples – collages of George Gross, made in 1915. He was one of the representatives of the Dada community in Germany, who had a great influence on the integration of the photo collage into actual art. He first used the definition of “Photomontage” in the late 10s of the last century. Other founders of the photomontage are John Heartfield, Hannah Heh, Kurt Schwitter, Raul Hausman and Johannes Baader. This art form was adopted and freely applied by European artists, for example, Salvador Dali.
For the first time a retrospective exposition of photo collages took place in 1931 in Germany. At the same time, domestic masters Alexander Rodchenko, Valentina Kulagina, El Lissitzky and Gustav Klutsis presented a bold composition in the style of a photo collage that glorified the regime of Soviet power.
Development of the photomontage direction
The art of photo collage was gradually forming on other continents – in South and North America. The direction of the work still had a social bias (for example, the collages of Lola Alvarez Bravo reflected the way of life of the citizens of Mexico). In the first half of the twentieth century, Greta Stern performed a number of compositions for articles on psychoanalysts in the periodical Aidilio.
Since the 20s of the last century, innovative techniques of early photo collage artists have been widely used in the marketing industry.
