Travelling images

Looking across the borderlands of art, media and visual culture

Anna Dahlgren

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526126665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte

This book critically examines images in the borderlands of the art world, investigating relations between visual art and vernacular visual culture within different images communities from the 1870s to the present day. It concentrates on the mechanisms of such processes and their implications for the understanding of art and art-historical narratives. Merging perspectives from art history and visual culture studies with media studies, it fills a gap in the field of visual studies through its use of a diversity of images as prime sources. Where textual statements are scarce the book maps visual statements instead, demonstrating the potential of image studies. Consequently, it will be of great relevance to those interested in art and visual culture in modernity, as well as discourses of the notion of art and art history writing.

1
Cut and paste

The introduction of Photoshop and other digital software for editing photographic images in the early 1990s heralded a surge in the production of photomontages, photocollages and other image manipulations in all genres. Although the tools were new, the themes or subject matter already had a long visual history and these gained new popularity in the wake of the so-called digital revolution in photography. When I wrote my thesis on this tranformational period, using Swedish image materials, I found some recurring themes, particularly in the daily press. Montages and collages were commonly used to portray politicians or abstract, metaphorical concepts in politics and business. A recurrent motif was a combination of photographs of politicians’ heads mounted on playing cards.¹ Some fifteen years later when I came across Victorian photocollages with the same motifs a question took shape in my mind. How could these motifs have travelled from the handmade Victorian albums in 1870s London to the pages of a Swedish newspaper in the 1990s (plate 1 and 2)?²

The aim of this chapter is to trace and emphasize the links between the nineteenth- and twentieth century practices of making photocollage, between the handmade and the mass produced, and between art and the press. By emphasizing the visual trajectories between the centuries and between different image communities this chapter seeks to revise the understanding of the history of photocollage.

Consequently this chapter inscribes and considers these early photocollages in another context, namely that of print culture and media history. As we turn our gaze to print media like daily journals and the illustrated press and literature there emerges a remarkable pattern of continuity, upholding traditions from the late nineteenth century into the the twentieth century and beyond as regards the practice of photocollage. Most art histories put the ‘invention’ of photomontage at c. 1910, used within the art field in constructivism, Dada and surrealism. This chapter maintains that there are several links between different image communities and between image techniques in the nineteenth century. It then argues that the printed press may be regarded as a link that connects the production of photocollage and photomontage in the nineteenth century with avant-garde art practices, as well as with the popular visual culture, of the early twentieth century.

This recontextualization enriches the understanding not only of these images’ origin, but also of their legacy. Accordingly, the combination of perspectives from art history, photo history and media history lays bare other trajectories and relationships, and new interpretations of visual culture of the late nineteenth century in which the first photocollages were produced.

The invention of photomontage and photocollage

According to the Raoul Hausmann, he and other Berlin Dada artists ‘were the first to use the material of photography to combine heterogenous, often contradictory structures, figurative and spatial, into a new whole that was in effect a mirror image wrenched from the chaos of war and revolution, as new to the eye as it was to the mind’.³ This, then, is a typical example of succession as defined by Manghani, of the failure to acknowledge predecessors. It is easy, in retrospect, to correct this, as the production of photomontage and photocollage had been around since the invention of photography, particularly during the sixty years preceding the Dada movement when paper became the dominant material for photographic images. Although photomontage and photocollage have been celebrated as a twentieth-century art forms invented by Dada artists in the 1910s there are today a number of scholars who have revised this story.⁴ Even the Dadaists themselves acknowledged their predecessors and sources of inspiration, to some extent. For example, Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch pointed out that popular postcards and the contemporary practice of making vernacular military memorials were among their sources of inspiration and, thus, they were not ignorant of historical predecessors.⁵

What from an art historical perspective appears to be a story of revolution and amnesia combined may instead be described as continous process where an image tradition is sustained. The history of photocollage and photomontage can be described as a trajectory of continuity and the upholding of a tradition, with regard to print culture, that is, illustrations in the press and literature as well as mass-produced photographs.

This chapter considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities, inclusions and exclusions, in the history of photocollage and photomontage. It deals with travelling images, illustrating how the technique of cutting up and reassembling of photographic elements has existed simultaneously (and appeared and disappeared), in different image communities. It also acknowledges travelling images in the form of images, motifs or visual content that have appeared and reappeared in photocollage and montages in different contexts of production and display, within the art worlds, but also in mass-produced carte-de-visite photographs, private albums and the illustrated press in different periods. Thus I argue that neither the technique of photomontage nor its alleged criticality were new in the 1910s when taken up by Dada and later by surrealist artists. Finally, this chapter deals with travelling images in a very literal sense, as material pictures that have been literally cut out from one context to be inserted in another: that is, a cut and paste art.

Two concepts have been used for the type of images discussed here, photocollage and photomontage. The term photomontage is commonly used to refer to composite pictures made up of several photographic elements, while photocollage includes photographs combined with non-photographic imagery such as line drawings, watercolours or printed picture elements.⁶ However, the concepts have not been used consistently, as pointed out by art historian Dawn Ades. In some cases the term has not even been based on the technical process but rather on the operation of transforming the meaning of the original photographs whether they are combined with other photographs, or with painted or drawn elements.⁷ In the following chapter I use the term photocollage throughout except when making direct references to earlier writings. This is not only to simplify the text but also to avoid a constant double reference. In this way I also try to evade a focus on the production technique of the elements they are made up of, which may be difficult to determine in some cases. Thus the common denominator of the images discussed here is the ‘photographic element’, which is cut out and inserted into a new context, consisting of other photographs or drawings, watercolours or printed texts or images.

A number of scholars have pointed out that there are two principal types of photocollage. The first, which has been labelled ‘naturalism’, strives to conceal its composite nature, while the second, labelled ‘formalism’, emphasizes and displays its composite nature, the juxtaposition of disparate elements.⁸ While the artistic uses of photocollage within Dada and surrealism have mostly been formalist collages, both types of photocollages appeared within and outside the art field in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter is divided into two parts. First, it includes a critical survey of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales for separation and forgetting, or acknowledging and linking, the photocollage practices of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. It thus includes examples of both amnesia and recognition. Second, it considers the agents and platforms for photocollage making in the nineteenth century as well as some particular images, that is, recurrent visual patterns, content and motifs. These images travelled synchronically as well as diacronically and, by looking at particular examples, the context of production of the nineteenth century as well as their relations to the production of art and popular visual culture in the following century are evident.

Photocollage avant la lettre

A vital element for making photocollages was access to printed images. By the seventeenth century it had become highly fashionable to collect printed material in the form of clippings that were later assembled in scrapbooks or on tableaux. The clippings came from journals, almanacs, fashion magazines, newspapers and advertising and also included die-cut images made especially for collaging.⁹ In ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: travelling images
• 1 Cut and paste
• 2 Modernism in the streets
• 3 Magazined art
• 4 Imposter art
• Bibliography
• Index
• Color Plates