Abbas (Abbas Attar)
[Photographer, b. 1944, Iran, d. 2018, Paris.]
Each picture should be good enough to stand on its own but its value is a part of something larger.
John Szarkowski
[Curator, critic, historian, and photographer, b. 1925, Ashland, Wisconsin, d. 2007, Pittsfield, Massachusetts.]
If his subject is a complex one, [the photographer] must use the single picture as a writer uses the sentence, as the dependent part of a single unitary statement. Communication is cumulative, and the individual picture is freed from the pretense of balanced finality.
Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]
One has to take different shots of a subject, from different points of view and in different situations, as if one examined it in the round rather than looked through the same key-hole again and again.
Hannah Höch
[Artist and photographer, b. 1889, Gotha, Germany, d. 1978, Berlin.]
[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)
Robert Heinecken
[Photographer, b. 1931, Denver, d. 2006, Albuquerque, New Mexico.]
I was never in a school situation where someone said, “This is the way a photograph is supposed to look.” I was completely open to cut them up, or do anything like that. I think if I had been in touch with people earlier, then I wouldn’t have felt comfortable doing that. It would have been too bizarre.
John Heartfield (Helmut Franz Joseph Herzfeld)
[Artist, b. 1891, Munich, Germany, d. 1968, Berlin.]
Photography is a mechanical device; photomontage is a piece of work done with the products of photography. This entire process forms one whole... If I assemble documents and juxtapose them with intelligence and skill, the effect of agitation and propaganda on the masses will be enormous.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
When you see a group of images together, they create their own context, and, in a sense, their own text.
Raoul Hausmann
[Artist, b. 1886, Vienna, d. 1971, Limoges, France.]
It was on the occasion of a visit to the Baltic seacoast on the island of Usedom in the little village of Heidebrink, that I conceived the idea of photomontage. On the walls of almost every house was a colored lithograph depicting the image of a grenadier against a background of barracks. To make this military memento more personal, a photographic portrait of a soldier had been used in place of the head. This was like a stroke of lightning, one could—I saw it instantly—make paintings entirely composed of cut-out photographs.
(Recollection of his 1918 epiphany)
