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Source: http://www.webworldarticles.com/e/a/title/Techniques-of-political-photomontage/

Political photomontage

The technique of photomontage was not widely used again until the Cubists and the Dadaists in the 20th century experimented with introducing sections of photographs and other printed material into their paintings. A Dadaist by the name of John Heartfield further developed this use of photography and is now commonly attributed as the founder of political photomontage.

John Heartfield was influenced by Dadaism and the newly emerging socialism in the Soviet Union. Sergei Tretyakov, a Russian born writer, showed Heartfield how a collection of facts carefully edited could convey a significant message. John Heartfield was already deeply involved with politics and he now saw how the graphic use of assembled photographs, combined with the mass production printing techniques of the time, could reach a wide audience with his political messages.

The techniques that John Heartfield developed in the 1920s and 1930s are still used by contemporary artists such as Klaus Staeck and Peter Kennard. In the 1980s Peter Kennard used photomontage to draw attention to the escalating arms race, his most famous works being associated with the organization CND (the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). Both artists have found photomontage an ideal medium to communicate social and political injustice to the public in an immediate and effective way. Through photomontage the public are asked to question the media images they see every day, thus raising their visual literacy.

Techniques of political photomontage

Text: Text included with most photomontages sets out to reinforce the message of the photographer or artist. The words can remove any possible ambiguity that the viewer may find, draw the attention to the conflict in the images or contradict the images entirely, thus establishing a satirical approach to the work.

Recognizing the familiar: The viewer is meant to recognize familiar images, paintings, photographs, advertising campaigns, etc. that the photomontage is based upon. The viewer is drawn to the differences from the original and the new meanings supplied by the changed information. This technique is often used in contemporary photomontage works. The technique is to make the familiar unfamiliar, e.g. ‘Cruise Missiles’ Peter Kennard, ‘Mona Lisa’ Klaus Staeck.

Contradiction: In many photomontages we see images that contradict each other. Introduced parts of the photomontage may be inconsistent with what we would normally expect to see happening in the image, thus questioning the original point of view. The contradiction can also be between what we see is happening and the text. Our curiosity to establish a coherent meaning in both cases is raised.

Contrast: To gain our attention individual components of the photomontage may be in sharp contrast to each other, e.g. wealth and extreme poverty, tranquillity and violence, happiness and sadness, industrialization and the countryside, filth and cleanliness, etc. Seeing through the lies: Many photomontages invite the viewer to look behind the surface or see through something to gain greater insight into the truth. Windows that open out to a different view, X-ray photographs that reveal a contradiction are all popular techniques.

Exaggeration of scale: By altering the scale of components of the photomontage the artist can exaggerate a point, e.g. a photomontage entitled ‘Big Business’ may include giant, cigar smoking, industrialists crushing smaller individuals under their feet.

Figures of speech: A very popular technique of the photomontage artist is to visualize figures of speech, e.g. puppet on a string, playing with fire, house of cards, etc. The artist may play upon the viewer’s acceptance of these as truth or use them as a contradiction in terms, e.g. ‘The camera never lies’.