John Heartfield

John Heartfield used pictures from books, magazines newspaper, and sometimes had photographs them made for him. The photographic ideas were about the Great War and the unsettled time afterwards and are very clear and direct in their meaning. By juxtaposition and rendering pictures together he saw the unsound ideology for what it was, and revealed class differences, and the emerging threat of fascism. The interesting thing about Heartfield was that he didn’t photograph any of the material himself, but his vision was strong and he was indeed incredible at post-production. The employed photographer said that he gave him a pencil sketch and always photographed under his supervision. He was by far the best creator of photomontages from the war. One montage in particular that I have seen is “Hurrah, the butter is finished” which was influenced by the speech of Goering where he said “iron always makes a country strong, butter and lard only makes people fat”. The picture is full of iron. Heartfield was himself politically involved in the Spanish republican government, which explains why his political photomontages was so good and became his strongest work even if he did other subjects. In history there were two separate developments of photomontage, one was the type conforming to ones popular in the USA supported by dada and expressionists, “the photomontage of form”, and the other one was the militant and political photomontages, which was especially promoted in the Soviet Union.