Aleksander Rodchenko
[Artist, designer, architect, b. 1891, St. Petersburg, d. 1956, Moscow.]
Contradictions of perspective. Contrasts of light. Contrasts of form. Points of view impossible to achieve in drawing and painting. Foreshortenings with a strong distortion of the objects, with a crude handling of matter. Moments altogether new, never seen before... compositions whose boldness outstrips the imagination of painters... Then the creation of those instants which do not exist, contrived by means of photomontage. The negative transmits altogether new stimuli to the sentient mind and eye.
Barbara Morgan
[Photographer, b. 1900, Buffalo, Kansas, d. 1992, North Tarrytown, New York.]
As the lifestyle of the Space Age grows more interdisciplinary, it will be harder for the “one-track” mind to survive, and photomontage will become increasingly necessary. I see simultaneous-intake, multiple-awareness and synthesized comprehension as inevitable, long before the year 2000 A.D.
(1971)
Francis Galton
[Polymath, explorer, anthropologist, inventor, meteorologist, statistician, b. 1822, Birmingham, England, d. Haslemere, Surrey, England.]
The inferiority of photographs to the best works of artists, so far as resemblance is concerned, lies in their catching no more than a single expression. If many photographs of a person were taken at different times, perhaps even years apart, their composite would possess that in which a single photograph is deficient.
Lewis Baltz
[Photographer, b. 1945, Newport Beach, California, d. 2014, Paris.]
While one image may be more interesting or appealing than another, each photograph is of equal importance and requires the context of the entire body of work to make its meaning fully understood. Like scenes from a film, the individual photograph, when removed from the series, is a fragment.
Robert Rauschenberg
[Artist, b. 1925, Port Arthur, Texas, d. 2008, Captiva Island, Florida.]
My fascination with images open 24 hrs. is based on the complex interlocking if disparate facts heated pool that have no respect for grammar. The form then Denver 39 is second hand to nothing. The work then has a chance to electric service become its own cliché. Luggage. This is the inevitable fate fair ground of any inanimate object freightways by this I mean anything that does not have inconsistency as a possibility built in...
Barbara Morgan
[Photographer, b. 1900, Buffalo, Kansas, d. 1992, North Tarrytown, New York.]
Photomontage is a “natural” of our times. It is the inevitable next step in photography. It demands and uses all the resources and knowledge of straight photography, plus heavy doses of imagination and design. Photomontage originates in this multiple kind of life we are living... the chief function of montage is that of mirroring this complex life.
David Goldblatt
[Photographer, b. 1930, Randfontein, South Africa, d. 2018, Johannesburg.]
…making a photograph is rather like writing a paragraph or a short piece, and putting together a whole string of photographs is like producing a piece of writing in many ways. There is the possibility of making coherent statements in an interesting, subtle, complex way.
John Heartfield (Helmut Franz Joseph Herzfeld)
[Artist, b. 1891, Munich, Germany, d. 1968, Berlin.]
A photograph can, by the addition of an unimportant spot of color, become a photomontage, a work of art of a special kind.
