Hannah Höch
[Artist and photographer, b. 1889, Gotha, Germany, d. 1978, Berlin.]
Of course, the camera is a far more objective and trustworthy witness than a human being. We know that a Brueghel or Goya or James Ensor can have visions or hallucinations, but it is generally admitted that a camera can photograph only what is actually there, standing in the real world before its lens.
[Dada photomontage] began with our [Höch and Raoul Hausmann] seeing an amusing oleograph on the wall of our guestroom in a fisherman’s cottage on the Baltic Sea. It depicted—fitted in among the pompous emblems of the Empire—five standing soldiers in five different uniforms—yet photographed only once—upon which the head of the fisherman’s son had been glued.
(Recounting an event in the summer of 1918)
I would like to show the world today as an ant sees it and tomorrow as the moon sees it.
