Photomontage

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Photomontage is the process (and result) of making a composite picture by cutting and joining a number of photographs. The English photographer Henry Peach Robinson (1830–1901) is credited with making the first photomontages, soon after starting his career in 1857.

Many of the early examples of fine-art photomontage consist of photographed elements superimposed on watercolours, a combination returned to by (e.g.) George Grosz in about 1915. He was part of the Dada movement in Berlin which was instrumental in making montage into a modern art-form. The other major exponents were John Heartfield, Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters, Raoul Hausmann and Johannes Baader. Parallel to the Germans, Russian Constructivist artists such as El Lissitzky and the husband-and-wife team of Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina created pioneering photomontage work for the Soviet government.

Other methods for combining pictures are also called photomontage, such as combination printing (the printing from more than one negative on a single piece of printing paper (e.g. O. G. Rejlander, 1857), front-projection and computer montage techniques.

Creating a photomontage has become easier with the advent of computer software such as Adobe Photoshop and GIMP. These programs make the changes digitally, allowing for faster workflow and more precise results.

Other influential artists that used photomontage include Aleksandr Rodchenko, Salvador Dalí, David Hockney and Thomas Ruff.

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