“The technique ‘Photomontage’ has been used by artists to create works which are powerful, confronting and satirical.”
Photomontages have been created by various artists including Hannah Hoch and John Heartfield. It is the technique of cutting and combining photos to create pictures which aren’t seen in reality and is used by artists to produce works which are powerful (having great influence), confronting (present acknowledgements) and satirical (the use of irony).
Hannah Hoch was born in Gotha, Germany on November 1st, 1889 and died on May 31st, 1978 at the age of 88 in her house.
She studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, a school of arts and craft in Berlin in 1912 and concentrated on collage techniques under Emil Orlik. She then met Raoul Hausmann, a Viennese artist, during WWI and had both an affair and artistic relationship with him from 1915-1922. During 1917, Hausmann declared the beginning of the Dada Movement, an artistic movement which dated from 1916 and was involved with (after WWI) political discrimination, with Hoch being the only woman among the Dadaists in Berlin. Some of her colleagues were Baader, Huelsenbeck, Grosz and Heartfield.
In 1919, Hannah Hoch developed a technique of analysing current issues in the form of photomontages using photos, paper objects, pieces of machines and other various objects. “Love in the Bush 1925”and “Half Caste 1924” are two examples of some of her works.
The satirical part of the photomontage ‘Love in the Bush’ is that it was created at a time where people in Germany had the idea that if a white person and a black person were in a relationship then it was rape, however, in this photomontage Hoch portrayed the relationship between white and black people to be happy and joyful. It didn’t look like rape at all.
This piece of work is powerful and confronting as it focuses on race and colour. It illustrates a dark male person holding/hugging a white woman, surrounded by bamboo trees and