Photomontage

Photomontage-the manipulated photograph -is as old as photography itself. Yet it was only with the chaotic, explosive impact of World War I that photomontage became an art form. The term was coined by the anti-art, anti-bourgeois Berlin Dadaists, whose members included John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausmann, and George Grosz. By breaking up images and using odd juxtapositions of fragmented photographs and other materialsthe stuff of today's and yesterday's news-they created a bold new art of agitation for posters, book jackets, magazine covers, and stage sets. The idea of photomontage was as revolutionary as its content: it emphasized the links between politics and the technological age to expose the disorder of bourgeois society.

What started as an inflammatory political joke soon became a conscious artistic technique. The use of bizarre images to render reality enigmatic was seized upon by the successors of Dadaism, the Surrealists. Artists such as Max Ernst, Moholy-Nagy, and Man Ray combined images of poetic power to form hallucinatory landscapes, pursuing a systematic derangement of the senses to express the internal chaos of the individual as well as the external chaos of the world.Patterned with 174 visually startling and intellectually exciting monochromes, Dawn Ades's book follows the fascinating evolution of photomontage, revealing different realities that disrupt our perceptions of the traditional world.