Photomontage

pho·to·mon·tage 

Noun A montage constructed from photographic images. The technique of constructing such a montage

Basically a Photomontage is where you combine lots of different photo's or pictures together to make a bigger picture. There are different kinds of photomontage now that we have developed editing software for computers, and it is possible to edit many photos together to make them look like one shot. But before we could do this photomontages were much more surreal looking and were used heavily by surrealist artists through the 20th century. 

This picture is a landscape made up of 16 different photos, manipulated using photoshop to make it look real, it is very clever.

Here is a comparison between a photomontage made by Herbert Bayer in 1932, and a photomontage that I found on the internet. As you can see the images in the first picture look like they have been cut out and placed together, where is the woman looks like that actually is her beard growing from her chin, with the use of computers it is much easier to create realistic looking photomontages, but they all stem from the works of surrealist artists such as Herbert Bayer and other artists working in the way around the same time. 

Hannah Hoch 

Hannah Hoch is very well known for her use of photomontage and is described as one of the originators of the art form. She was a German artist working who's work became well known around the early 1920's. She was part of the Dada movement in Berlin and worked closely with a lot of other artists involved in Dadaism. She was a strong feminist and a strong woman, which must have been very hard for her at that time. 

I like her work, although I do think a lot of the work being produced by artists working under dadaism was very similar, but I like this one in particular. Hoch is trying to challenge people's views on femininity by taking these pictures of legs and eyes and lips and other female body parts that are so well known for being considered feminine and beautiful, and used photomontage to create a weird, unusual and not so beautiful image. I really like the way she has changed the proportions to make it look even more unusual and surreal. The more research I do the more I am coming to like the work of surreal artists, but I find it so hard to work in this way myself.

I had to do a project on photomontage at college, we had to chose either a film/game or T.V series but I couldn't decide and I really wanted to do something I really enjoyed as I thought that then I would be able to design it better. I asked if I could do a music label, which I was aloud so I chose 'Bad Boy Records', a record label focusing on rap music in the 1990's.

This is the final poster I produced for the brief, in which I had to pretend I was producing a poster for the company themselves.