Practise Photomontage

Posted on October 24, 2012 by yun12photo

The Flagpole

Image From Each Artist (Political & Social Photomontage)

Posted on October 19, 2012 by yun12photo

Hannah Hoch

Balance, 1925

This is my favourite work by Hannah Hoch. I love this photo because it displays the elements of colour and value, as well as the principle of dominance. The way in which it demonstrates colour is just throughout the whole photo; the majority of it is very eye-catching and filled with bright colours. There are many different tones in the colour to add value as well. It shows the principle of dominance because of the enlarged faces of the people. It immediately draws your attention to their faces. The message that Hoch is trying to convey with her work is a message of acceptance towards everyone. She has taken bits and pieces of all types of body sizes and ethnicities, as well as incorporated both genders. It screams a message of unity, of everyone living together in peace as one.

John Heartfield

Adolph The Superman, 1932

This is my favourite piece of work by John Heartfield. I love it because of the very true message it paints. It displays Hitler with a transparent chest area, showing, from far away, what seems to be the spine, ribcage, and heart. But upon closer inspection, you can see that where his heart is supposed to be, there is a Swastika sign, and where his spinal cord is, there are a pile of coins. This shows what Hitler was truly composed of – he was in all aspects a normal physical human being, but his inner beliefs were that of the ugliest kind. This picture shows the element of space: Hitler is the positive space that takes up the majority of the work, and the negative space is the white background. This also shows the principle of balance, because Hitler is centered, which draws the onlooker’s attention straight away to his “innards”.

Raoul Hausmann

Dada Conquers, 1920

By Raoul Hausmann, this is my favourite photo. I love it because it showcases the beginnings of the Dada movement, and how prominent it became in the world of art in such a short time. The picture, as you can see, is extremely cluttered with a variety of objects. To the untrained eye, this might seem too overwhelming and not very visually appealing. But in the eyes of a grade 12 photography student, this has a lot of meaning. First off, the photo in the center of the photo (inception) is what we see first. It is an olden-time ghost town, and it says that before Dada, art was beginning to get dull and repetitive. Then your eyes follow up and onto the picture of the world map, with Dada written on it. It shows to us that the Dada movement is quickly spreading all over the world. Then you move to all other areas of the photo, and see that there are a variety of things; the human body symbolizes the enveloping nature of Dada as an art form, the person dressed up as a reporter symbolizes how everyone wants to know more about this fresh new art, and the typewriters and the guy with the open skull symbolizes that there is actually a lot of thinking behind the creation of Dada art pieces; it’s not just all “paint what you see”. The elements of size and direction are shown in this picture in direct correlation with one another. The photo is the largest size in this work, so we see it first. Then the direction directs us upwards, to the second-largest thing, and so forth. The principle of repetition can be seen with the objects coming out of the wall (pipes?) which Hausmann used to emphasize meaning.

David Hockney

This photomontage by David Hockney is one of my favourite works of his. And I say one of my favourite because there are a lot more that I really like, but this is definitely at the top. It’s a picture (or many) that shows a telephone pole from bottom to top. I love this picture simply because it gives you the feeling of being a little person; the angle at which you see the top of the telephone pole makes it seem taller than the ones in real life are. It makes for a very interesting picture. As is the aim of photomontage, I enjoy the different ways in which each individual photo has been shot. Some of them are enveloped in shadows, while others are in bright daylight. It gives off the eye-pleasing principle of contrast. The elements of line and direction are prominent because of the line shape of the telephone pole, as well as the fact that it is shooting up in the sky, giving me a sense of which direction my eyes should head. What Hockney was trying to communicate with this piece is that although technology is a great thing, don’t think it’s the end of the line for development – technology is and will always be moving forward (the phone pole represents technology)

David Hockney

Posted on October 19, 2012 by yun12photo

1. David Hockney was a British artist born on July 9th, 1937 in Bradford, England, to Laura and Kenneth Hockney. He did very well in his studies, and in 1948, when he was only 11 years old, he won a scholarship to the Bradford Grammar School, one of the best schools in the country. At BGS, he found that he liked art the most, and that’s what launched his life-long love for everything art related. In 1953, he enrolled in the College of Art, and began working with oils. In the summer of 1957, David took the National Diploma in Design Examination, which led to his enrollment into the Painting School of the Royal College. He began expressing his sexual orientation more in his works while at Royal College because he befriended other gay men, and he stated that there was where he felt truly at home. Later on, he travelled to New York for the first time, and sold some of his paintings in order to pay for his trip. He received various teaching offers at universities, and continued to gain acknowledgement for his works. He also experienced his first true love. In the 80s, he became obsessed with taking multiple pictures as quickly as he can, and making collages out of them or piecing them together. Furthermore, he continued to experiment with the ever-growing development of technology, and he delighted in the fact that he could send his art to his loved ones so speedily, thus making the act of sharing his art so much easier. David Hockney is so important in the aspects of pioneering the Hockney pieces created all over the world, and he is known as one of the most influential artists of the 20^th Century.

2. The way in which David Hockney compositionally structures his pictures is unique from that of a conventional photographer is how he takes a bunch of pictures of every area of his subject, using a variety of differences such as zooming in/out, taking it with various lighting techniques, and dressing the subject up in different clothing (if subject is human), then pieces them all together to create a collage or tile-like structure. It’s a very different and fresh outlook on things, and it gets the onlooker thinking about what they’re looking at in a different way, since the work is so aesthetically odd.

3. With photomontage, it allows Hockney to put his own unique style onto photos that no one else had ever thought of. It also allows the viewer to see the piece in many different ways; since there are so many little individual pictures that come together to create the big one. With regular photos, one only sees the whole picture and says “oh that’s great this picture is so great let’s move on to the next one” but with Hockney’s artworks, it allows someone to really be able to scrutinize the finer details because of the specific blocked areas.

4. David Hockney’s works are much like Picasso’s Cubism works. They are similar because with Picasso’s Cubism method of art, he paints a lot of “cubed” areas where he can either add more detail or make it more vague, and that in turn contributes to the overall niceness of the piece of work. Hockney’s technique uses the same sort of concept, only with a different medium: photography.

Dadism – A Revolutionary Movement

Posted on October 17, 2012 by yun12photo

1. In the revolutionary times following WWI, artists began to see the use of montage as a truly new art form. In Berlin, a group of artists, self-named Dada, were looking for a new means of expression, one that had more meaning than abstraction but did not return to the tradition of figurative painting. Hannah Hoch, who was a prominent figure in the Dadism movement, said: “Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry into the world of art.”

2. Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann were two partners that were the driving forces for the Dadism movement. They were having intimate relationships as well. Hausmann claimed to have invented the word “photomontage”. Hoch’s early works at the collaborative Dada style stand out from all the others as the workings of a very talented artist. John Heartfield was a very single-minded person with an extreme devotion to the anti-Nazi political activism. He was a part of the Berlin group and his early montages resembled the work of all other Dadaists.

3. The style of the Dadaists was wildly anarchic, using many elements, some of which included photos of the Dada artists, usually beside random newspaper clippings. This form of art was so unique simply for the reason that it had never been done before. It was so fresh, so new, and the people embraced it with a burning passion.