Deconstructive Montage takes well known images and subvert their meaning by cutting and pasting. Here is an example by Dada artist Hannah Hoch, playing with the idea of ‘typical’ female and male roles. She played with the female body but also sociopolitical ideas like industrialisation.
The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks for Big Gifts, 1932
© 2006 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
This one above is pretty funny. John Heartfield parodies a gesture of Hitler's (not the salute most well known to me) to give the impression there is something other going on, than what is shown to the world. Heartfield used a difference in scale to highlight the relationship between the characters. The leader is seen as a puppet. The gesture now reads as the acceptance of monetary influence. http://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/heartfield/
Deconstructive Montage has evolved with the emergence of photo-editing tools such as Photoshop and the access to images via the internet. Banksy uses this form, just as I mentioned he uses culture jamming. It has also been used by amateur online activists, characterised as ‘Photoshop for Democracy’ by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture (New York University Press 2006).
I am not going to talk about Peter Kennard here, as I want to research him in more depth for this project. This one by Martha Rosler below shows the kind of thing I am going for, aesthetically. It can still be real life situations, on constructed images as I've done before, but juxtaposed with source, archival, googled and / or iconic images. The technique just frees me up for creating the images I want to say what I want to say. And it is a perfect way to work in this climate of stage 4 lockdown.
House Beautiful: Bringing the War Home, New Series (2004-2008) http://www.martharosler.net/house-beautiful-bringing-the-war-home-new-series-carousel
#montage #deconstructivemontage #compositing #photoshoptechniques #postproductionphotography #research #tutorials #John Heartfield #Peter Kennard #Banksy #Martha Rosler