Thursday 6 January 2011

Dadaism / Surrealism

The Dada movement was an anti-war art movement wich developed in the early 1900s; this was a very rebellious and inovative movement wich made a statement with each piece about polotics, war or society.



In this art movement, artists used a technique called photomontage where they cut out images and then stuck them down in a different way to create a new meaning to the image. Above is a piece by Hannah Hoch called Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany. This collage is a piece about life in Weimar Germany in 1919. 

I believe it was this photomontage technique where different images are combined to create new meanings which the surrealists were inspired by to create their paintings. The surrealist technique is fairly similar, they use images from real life and take them out of context to create new images and also combine this with elements from the imagination to create a piece which is often both realistic and yet impossible. I am facinated by surrealism and love how it can be used in photography today, i hope to include more surrealist aspects in one of my future projects.

Modern surrealist photographers have the great advantange of modern technology; the invention of the digial camera and photo editing softwear like photoshop has enabled artists to create shockingly realistic surrealist images. I am really captured by the way it is possible to create an image which in real life is completely impossible and yet appears completely real in the image!

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