Modern Photomontage...

Karen Knorr

Peter Kennard

Peter Kennard (born 17 February 1949^[1]) is a London born and based photomontage artist and senior tutor in photography at the Royal College of Art.^[2] Seeking to reflect his involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement, he turned from painting to photomontage to better address his political views. He is best known for the images he created for theCampaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in the 1970s-80s.

'Kennard and Picton-Phillips have taken the shot of the last Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair taking a photo of himself with a mobile phone camera - originally in front of a group of students - and set his smiling pose against a fiery backdrop of a burning oil field. 

The result is an arresting piece of art, a visual representation of anti-war sentiment taking the original innocence of a moment and ruthlessly subjugating it to question the reliability of media information and the portrayal of politicians and their celebrity amidst such incredible devastation. '

www.artrepublic.com

The impetus for this photomontage was the proposal to hone US nuclear cruise missiles in the East Anglian countryside. It was also a response to a Ministry of Defence leaflet, which portrayed the missiles in delicate watercolours as a harmonious part of the landscape. Here Peter Kennard combines two existing images to create a critical new meaning. He takes John Constable's painting The Hay Wain (1821), an idyllic depiction of the East Anglian countryside, and superimposes thrree nuclear warheads on the hay wagon. The subversion of a familiar icon of pastoral England achieves a chilling effect.

David Hockney

The "joiners"

David Hockney has also worked with photography, or, more precisely, photocollage. Using varying numbers of small Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. One of his first photomontages was of his mother. Because these photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity with Cubism, which was one of Hockney's major aims—discussing the way human vision works. Some of these pieces are landscapes such as Pearblossom Highway #2,^[2][3] others being portraits, e.g. Kasmin 1982,^[4] and My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982.^[5]

Hockney created these photomontage works mostly between 1970 and 1986. He referred to them as "joiners".^[6] He began this style of art by taking Polaroid photographs of one subject and arranging them into a grid layout. The subject would actually move while being photographed so that the piece would show the movements of the subject seen from the photographer's perspective. In later works Hockney changed his technique and moved the camera around the subject instead.

Hockney's creation of the "joiners" occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses to take pictures. He did not like such photographs because they always came out somewhat distorted. He was working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles. He took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. Upon looking at the final composition, he realized it created a narrative, as if the viewer was moving through the room. He began to work more and more with photography after this discovery and even stopped painting for a period of time to exclusively pursue this new style of photography. Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its 'one eyed' approach,^[7] he later returned to painting.