Cortar y pegar

The manipulation of photographic imagery is as old as photography itself, but the modernist conception of photomontage was a radical extension of techniques and creative attitudes that first emerged in Cubist, Futurist and Dadaist collage, in which cut-out photographs and fragments of newsprint from illustrated journals were pasted into drawings and paintings.

This method of combining and manipulating photographic elements was developed towards the end of the First World War by Dadaists in Berlin such as John Heartfield, George Grosz, Johannes Bader and Hannah Höch. Simultaneously, in Moscow young Constructivist artists such as Gustav Klucis, Varvara Stepanova and El Lissitzky began to incorporate photographic images into their works. The choice of the term ‘photomontage’, full of modernist connotations and derived from engineering and film editing, set the technique apart from traditional artistic practices.

En Londres hay un pequeño museo que hace un repaso a la historia del collage. Una servidora es fan de Hannah Höch.