Photomontage

Photomontage is a technique, and its product, in which a new image, printed page, or composition is assembled from cut and combined photographs, often together with text. Unlike seamless retouching, classic photomontage deliberately shows its seams and collisions, generating sharp political or poetic meanings. The technique flourished with Dada and Constructivism in the early 1920s: Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausmann, and especially John Heartfield, who turned photomontage into a powerful anti-fascist weapon of the poster. Within the Ukrainian avant-garde the Kharkiv artist Vasyl Yermilov used collage and montage methods, combining photography, typography, and geometric form. Photomontage remains a living tool of advertising, book design, and political art, and in the digital age its logic has become the ubiquitous foundation of image editing.