Lissitzsky

A constructivist of the avant-garde russe.1890-1941 Lissitzsky of 1909-1914. After having been a painter, an illustrator and an originator of the Soviet flags, it taught with Malevich with Vitebsk and the workshops of art in Moscow. It arrived to Berlin in 1921 and established exposures of art by the avant-garde post-revolutionist, also working as an author and an originator for the international stores. Its achievements acted like a campaign to forge bonds between the artists in Russia and in the west, between Stijl and constructivism of Weimar' S. Its own paintings of Proun, Proun being a acronyrn meaning for new art, express its vision of a world of the physique inspired by modern thought of spiritualist. They were produced while victory over the sun, which suggests the similar concern. Its work was designed to be a catalyst to encourage the general orientation to form a classless society. Its publications include the Kunstismen matrix, with Hans Arp, a number of magazine of Merz, with Schwitters, other books and independent contributions.

Le Roux François painting and techniques mixtes

Francois Roux is primarily a painter, his collages are glued paper painted by himself. "In the tables of François Le Roux, Groom, dolls, infantes, painters, models, workshop, birds, cats, trees and various objects, angels, hearts, moons, suns, airplanes, ships, skulls, masks, both living beings and inanimate transforming, moving, moving meet, entangle, Fit, soar, hug. The works François Roux are illuminated fables, legends bariolées, or as color-short ....." Gilbert Lascault

Francois Roux is primarily a painter, his collages are glued paper painted by himself. In his abstract works it multiplies drips, traces unclear lines lost modifying whole. The table is simultaneously complete and incomplete. Each works is an adventure, worse it offers the artist to new inventions, other quests. Thanks to alleged errors, a table can be built and he lives. It is, discards, is covered, then ressucite.

From book of Gilbert Lascault les Poèmes polychromes de François le Roux

Only in french

Schwitters Kurt

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) Excluded from the movement Hobby-horse Berlin, it reacts by melting Dada Hanover. This movement was founded on the apolitical one (thus with the antipodes of the designs of Berlin Hobby-horse, which was a politically engaged movement), the fantastic one and constructivism. Its principal pillars are the Merz review, and the art of the same name.

Merz is a reduction of the word Kommerz which we were able to read on a collage of year 1919. The word arose organically from the merzage of the picture(board), not accidentally, because in the artistic development nothing is accidental, what is logical. J named formerly this picture, according to its legible part, picture Merz. When looking for a generic name for my art, j understood that I created except the usual generic notions, I l named according to the most characteristic picture, the picture Merz. The notion Merz was untranslatable and thus susceptible to evolve in the management given by the picture Merz. By a logical overbid, I gave to the notion of Merz its current meaning and offered it to the community by means of the magazine Merz.
Merz write 1923

The process on which this art is founded is at the same time a major process of all the literary Hobby-horse as much as plastic: it is about joining. One found on his fabrics of the tickets of bus, the scraps of posters or newspapers, of the rags, the buttons, the pieces of fabrics, the stoppers, etc which constituted “harmonious” tables. Merz is besides the fragment of a paper where was writes the German word Kommerz, of Kommerz Bank. (Merz perhaps also translated into French by “trick”, “thing”, which characterizes these assemblies of various elements indeed…) L studied the painting of 1909 to 1914 with the Academy of Dresden. It took part in the review der Sturm of Berlin. Large friend of Hausmann and Arp, it founded a movement parallel with the Hobby-horse which it named Merz. From 1930 to 1948, it took refuge in Norway to flee the Nazism. It was pointed out by drawings with the pencil, the charcoal, the watercolour then joinings and assemblies since 1919. Refused to the Hobby-horse of Berlin by Huelsenbeck, it reacts and creates its Merzbild table in 1919. The word Merz being cut out since Kommerz in a printed advertisement. In 1923, it creates its work in Hanover, Merzbau, a whole of timber structures and plaster with cavities where is embedded its work and those of his/her friends. Destroyed in 1943, it partially rebuilt by Switzerland Harald Szeemann. After 1923, it binds with the constructivists Theo van Doesburg and Russian El Lissitsky. It carried out with them the Merz review appeared between 1923 and 1932. A power station of Merz publicity was creates and it launched the new advertisement for firms like Pelikan, Opel or Bahlsen. After the German invasion of Norway, it resided in 1946 at Ambleside in Westmoreland in England. In February 1995, the Beaubourg Center in Paris organized a Schwitters exposure. It published Anna Blume in 1919 and Ursonate in 1932.

When Schwitters died to Wesmoreland he was far from suspecting that one day he would contribute to make the fortune of the industrialists of the glue in the world. Hundreds of thousands of collagistes applied more or less talented, make collages conscientiously shown during hundreds of exhibitions(exposures) today which are applauded, analyzed and bought, with the aim of achieving a world célbrité. Schwitters was not able to attend his world success, he would have appreciated a lot.

Stezaker John

John Stezaker been born in 1949 in Great Britain.

There are few documents on the course and the step of John Stezaker. He however exposed in the best Museum d contemporary art and his paintings faces in l permanent exhibition of the Tate gallery in London on the collage.

John Stezaker’s work re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Through his elegant juxtapositions, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings.

Coupling male and female identity into unified characters, Stezaker points to a disjointed harmony, where the irreconciliation of difference both complements and detracts from the whole. In his correlated images, personalities (and our idealisations of them) become ancillary and empty, rendered abject through their magnified flaws and struggle for visual dominance.
In using stylistic images from Hollywood’s golden era, Stezaker both temporally and conceptually engages with his interest in Surrealism. Placed in contemporary context, his portraits retain their aura of glamour, whilst simultaneously operating as exotic ‘artefacts’ of an obsolete culture. Similar to the photos of ‘primitivism’ published in George Bataille’s Documents, Stezaker’s portraits celebrate the grotesque, rendering the romance with modernism equally compelling and perverse.

They involve images taken by a myriad of sources and arranged in a grid representing transistors, as described by Anne Bartlett Ayres: "The image of radios and serves as a" base "is a collage receiver deities and demons , An issuer of talismans and secret codes: Hebrew letters, crosses of all kinds, locks, keys and doors; fragments of Greek and Eastern sculptures, photographs by contemporary religious leaders appeared in newspapers; naked women, portions of bodies, heaps of 'Stars; rifles and snakes and birds and roses and mushrooms.

In its brief and intense life Berman devoted this relentless pursuit of the unspoken and yet the "unscribed." in 1957, its first and only public exhibition at the Ferus Gallery, was closed by the LAPD and Berman was arrested for displaying what was then regarded as "pornography." As a result of the indignity to which he has undergone it withdraws from the scene of public art completely. Berman abandoned Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco, returning in 1963 to Topanga Canyon where he lived and worked until his death. Berman left Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco, back in 1963 in Topanga Canyon, where he lived and worked until his death in 1976.

According to Freedom of the Centre Pompidou exhibition Los angeles 1955 - 1985

Roman CIESLEWICZ

Throughout its professional life, Roman Cieslewicz showed an exceptional inventiveness. With an untameable creative energy and without being concerned with borders, it used joining and the photomontage to divert images and to create strange associations. The quasi systematic use of the colors sharp and the pure forms gives to its creations a single and immediately recognizable seal. Beyond its artistic qualities, Roman Cieslewicz remains also unforgettable for its standpoint, its claims, its engagement but also its capacity to be shocked. Biography of the author Born in 1930 in Poland, Roman Cieslewicz passed most of its life to France. Its work, completely singular definitively upset contemporary graphic creation. Funny, provocative, sometimes even uncomfortable or dérangeantes, its image cannot leave us indifferent. Disappeared in 1996, Roman Cieslewicz is without any doubt a emblematic figure of contemporary graphics. IT HUSTLES all the rules. It stirs up the spirits. ll triturates the images with the scissors, the photocopier and the adhesive to recycle them in a strange, provocative and poetic way. It diverts reality, recomposes it to create an inventive, free, coloured and black world at the same time, passing very close to the unreal one sometimes. The French artist of Polish extraction, Romance Cieslewicz (born in 1930 in Lwow, died in 1996 in Paris), that which was defined as a “pointsman of retina” to have the eye and the world with the eye, left us the explosive work among richest, most expressive, most claiming of the school of the Polish poster artists; this school born in the crucible of propaganda after the Second World war. Its style, founded on the circle, the large obliques, exaggerated off-centrings, the use of the letter for its figurative value, is recognized in the moment. The artist unceasingly nourishes associations of images in black and white (800/1 200 € for Topor, a photocollage of 1978, 2.000/3 000 €, joining original for It of 1968 with its bodies of truncated women, in fishnet stocking) but also colors sharp (2 000/4 000 € for the image icon of Che If, original model for the cover Opus n° 3). The world of Cieslewicz touches us by the expression of turbulences of its heart, its humour and its phantasms. Poetic and extremely at the same time. Always full with modernity.

John Heartfield

First painter he is best known for his collages violently denouncing Nazism. His work is published in newspapers communists. Friends of George Grosz he was admitted to the Dada movement in 1918.

The photomontage and photograms are inseparable from the new way to see who emerges in 1920 in Germany with John Heartfield is one of the actors. The New Vision opposes upstream and downstream two photographic art movements: Pictorialism and the new objectivity. The pictorialist photography dominated the soumettrant pictorial model. The photomontage used as a means of resistance are also a reaction to the painting which he denounces Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Höch increasing abstraction, conceptual vacuum, the break with reality. It also contributes in a breakthrough in making visible the social and political situations outrageous by photography.

Jiri Kolar

At the beginning of 1918, Raoul Haussmann had started to make tables with fragments of posters, coloured bits of paper and newspaper cuttings. But it is at the time of a stay at the edge of the Baltic, with Hannah Hoch, that it had the idea of the photomontage. In almost all the houses where was hung, with the wall, a lithography color, image kind of Epinal, representing a pomegranate on bottom of barracks. To make this memorandum more personal, several families had had the idea to stick to the place of the head pomegranate a photograph of the son or the husband died in the face. It was like a flash, writing Hausmann, I live itself instantaneously to make tables entirely made up of cut out photographs. The extract the Author, an autobiography (Olivier/the Threshold, 2001) and Roussel limited liability company (Al Dante/Scheer, 2003). If collage cubist allowed a new projection in the investigation of space, the photomontage makes it possible Hausmann to analyze the image and its operation. I adopted with the discovery of the photomontage a supra-realistic attitude, which makes it possible to work with a prospect in several centers and to superimpose objects and surfaces? , writes he in his synthetic Cinéma text of painting. Such a freedom makes it possible the artist to obtain complex images mixing the visual element, the letters, the words, often joining together the organic world, emotional and it mechanical.

Philibert Charrin

PHILIBERT-CHARRIN (1920 - 2007) Figure uncontested of the art of collage during 50 years, it carries out “painting-joinings” starting from materials, pieces of paper, most various of fabric or partitions, old subway tickets etc… Pierre Brisset in the revie the Eye in December 1985 wrote: ”… Regarded since too a long time as minor art, and even a diversion for (poor) surrealist delayed which is satisfied to replace the head of the Mona Lisa by that of a rhinoceros or to finish in tail of the Venus body of the titien, joining finds with Charrin its true identity. Philippe Charrin is not only a one creator full with imagination and sensitivity, but still a painter authenticates who, even without lesecours brush manages, as Jean-François chabrun wrote it at one time, “to translate” the values of the true painting”

Raoul Haussmann

At the beginning of 1918, Raoul Haussmann had started to make tables with fragments of posters, coloured bits of paper and newspaper cuttings. But it is at the time of a stay at the edge of the Baltic, with Hannah Hoch, that it had the idea of the photomontage. In almost all the houses where was hung, with the wall, a lithography color, image kind of Epinal, representing a pomegranate on bottom of barracks. To make this memorandum more personal, several families had had the idea to stick to the place of the head pomegranate a photograph of the son or the husband died in the face. It was like a flash, writing Hausmann, I live itself instantaneously to make tables entirely made up of cut out photographs In this he was followed by Hannah Hoch. The extract the Author, an autobiography (Olivier/the Threshold, 2001) and Roussel limited liability company (Al Dante/Scheer, 2003). If joining cubist allowed a new projection in the investigation of space, the photomontage makes it possible Hausmann to analyze the image and its operation. I adopted with the discovery of the photomontage a supra-realistic attitude, which makes it possible to work with a prospect in several centers and to superimpose objects and surfaces? , writes he in his synthetic Cinéma text of painting. Such a freedom makes it possible the artist to obtain complex images mixing the visual element, the letters, the words, often joining together the organic world, emotional and it mechanical.

Martial Raysse

First abstract painter on the French Riviera in the 50 years it calls into question his career.
Beginning in 1959, Martial Raysse uses all sorts of materials and techniques: plastic, plexiglass, neon, mirrors, paint, artificial light, objects, photographs, photocopies, spraying, cutting, report, assembly, including expansion. During this period he uses techniques including assembly He stayed with the United States it is to the American Pop Art and is a part, since its foundation en1960 of the New Realist movement may then be defined as "a painter of modern life .

Raysse introduce neon in his paintings to emphasize certain forms, mouth, eyes. "I discovered neon. It is the color vibrant color across the color. The artist takes an approach for the reduction of plastic and ways to simplify the representation

Pictorialism

By Mélon Marc émmanuel HANNON ÉDOUARD (1853-1931)

Photo hobbyist, born in Ixelles, in the suburbs of Brussels, of a family of the Belgian upper middle classes, Édouard Hannon made studies of engineer at the university of Ghent. The famous firm of chemicals Solvay charged it, in 1877, with founding a branch with Dombasle, in French Lorraine. At the time of this stay, it discovers the workshop of glassmaking and cabinet work that Emile Gallé had just founded in Nancy. Its sensitivity to the Art nouveau engaged it, as of the beginning of the years 1890, to join the rows of the photo hobbyists eager to make recognize photography like an art. It was the beginning of what is called today the school of the pictorialism in photography, a movement born in the mobility of the Art nouveau and which, in the same spirit, sought to make apply to photography, always regarded as an industrial art, criteria of appreciation in force for the fine arts.

This dichotomy whose still photography at the end suffered of the XIXe century, Hannon made the experiment in its photographic practice of it even. As a photo hobbyist, member of the Association Belgian of photography, and thus in favour of the theses pictorialists, Hannon carried out a work which one can describe as “erudite”, because referring to the rules of the composition, framing and contrast. He used the techniques of pulling sophisticated in vogue near the photographers artists (pulling with coal, with dichromate gum) and invented with ingeniousness some processes making it possible to return the effects of screen and blur, so much at the time required. Beside this official work, which was entitled to the ogee mouldings of the living rooms, Hannon carried out as an engineer an important collection of stereotypes taken during its many voyages abroad where the Solvay company sent it to control the installation of its subsidiary companies.

These photographs, which one knows the negative ones but few pullings, are presented in the form of travel souvenirs, traces of the visited places, without apparent concern of the composition nor of framing. But what, in the spirit of Hannon, was not to undoubtedly be that a book of notes seems today a report of an exceptional quality on the social life - mainly urban life of the underprivileged classes - from Europe, the United States and especially of Russia tsarist of the end of the XIXe century. As a testimony, the work of Hannon takes seat at the sides of the great names of documentary photographic, like Lewis Hine or Walker Evans. However, the high informative value of this report should not occult its astonishing formal qualities. Indeed, the stereotypes of Hannon are as unfinished sketches if one compares them with his photographs pictorialists tallied, drawn and exposed with all the care required for a work of art. But with the passing of time, one discovers that these sketches in fact are controlled in a way surprisingly meticulous person and that they are subjected not to a pictorial esthetics, but with a specifically photographic esthetics, based on the off-registration, the out-field and the against-composition. Hannon must have an incredibly premonitory vision of what would be, thirty years later, the movement of the pure photography, exaltée by Strand and Stieglitz in the United States, or by Feininger and Renger-Patzsch in Germany. The work of Édouard Hannon was rediscovery and studied by the Belgian photographer Gilbert De Keyser, then safeguarded and preserved by photographic Space Contretype, center of contemporary photography, installed since 1988 in the old private mansion of the photographer, in Saint-Gilles, Brussels.

This beautiful residence Art nouveau was built in 1903 by a friend of Édouard Hannon, the architect Jules Brunfaut. Photographic Space Contretype devoted several exposures to Hannon, in particular É. Hannon and the new art, in 1993.

hoto hobbyist, born in Ixelles, in the suburbs of Brussels, of a family of the Belgian upper middle classes, Édouard Hannon made studies of engineer at the university of Ghent. The famous firm of chemicals Solvay charged it, in 1877, with founding a branch with Dombasle, in French Lorraine. At the time of this stay, it discovers the workshop of glassmaking and cabinet work that Emile Gallé had just founded in Nancy. Its sensitivity to the Art nouveau engaged it, as of the beginning of the years 1890, to join the rows of the photo hobbyists eager to make recognize photography like an art. It was the beginning of what is called today the school of the pictorialism in photography, a movement born in the mobility of the Art nouveau and which, in the same spirit, sought to make apply to photography, always regarded as an industrial art, criteria of appreciation in force for the fine arts.

This dichotomy whose still photography at the end suffered of the XIXe century, Hannon made the experiment in its photographic practice of it even. As a photo hobbyist, member of the Association Belgian of photography, and thus in favour of the theses pictorialists, Hannon carried out a work which one can describe as “erudite”, because referring to the rules of the composition, framing and contrast. He used the techniques of pulling sophisticated in vogue near the photographers artists (pulling with coal, with dichromate gum) and invented with ingeniousness some processes making it possible to return the effects of screen and blur, so much at the time required. Beside this official work, which was entitled to the ogee mouldings of the living rooms, Hannon carried out as an engineer an important collection of stereotypes taken during its many voyages abroad where the Solvay company sent it to control the installation of its subsidiary companies.

These photographs, which one knows the negative ones but few pullings, are presented in the form of travel souvenirs, traces of the visited places, without apparent concern of the composition nor of framing. But what, in the spirit of Hannon, was not to undoubtedly be that a book of notes seems today a report of an exceptional quality on the social life - mainly urban life of the underprivileged classes - from Europe, the United States and especially of Russia tsarist of the end of the XIXe century. As a testimony, the work of Hannon takes seat at the sides of the great names of documentary photographic, like Lewis Hine or Walker Evans. However, the high informative value of this report should not occult its astonishing formal qualities. Indeed, the stereotypes of Hannon are as unfinished sketches if one compares them with his photographs pictorialists tallied, drawn and exposed with all the care required for a work of art. But with the passing of time, one discovers that these sketches in fact are controlled in a way surprisingly meticulous person and that they are subjected not to a pictorial esthetics, but with a specifically photographic esthetics, based on the off-registration, the out-field and the against-composition. Hannon must have an incredibly premonitory vision of what would be, thirty years later, the movement of the pure photography, exaltée by Strand and Stieglitz in the United States, or by Feininger and Renger-Patzsch in Germany. The work of Édouard Hannon was rediscovery and studied by the Belgian photographer Gilbert De Keyser, then safeguarded and preserved by photographic Space Contretype, center of contemporary photography, installed since 1988 in the old private mansion of the photographer, in Saint-Gilles, Brussels.

This beautiful residence Art nouveau was built in 1903 by a friend of Édouard Hannon, the architect Jules Brunfaut. Photographic Space Contretype devoted several exposures to Hannon, in particular É. Hannon and the Art nouveau, in 1993.

The esthetic statute of photography appears of an exceptional ambiguity. It gave place to no great general theory, but it is the fact as many estheticians as professional experts. The expression even of “beautiful photograph”, pejorative at much of them, remains laudatory among amateurs, who - exceptional fact as regards art - adopt each day this activity more. “A fortuitous sunbeam or a shade through the way, a oak desiccated by time, a covered stone of foam can wake up a series of thoughts, feelings and imaginations picturesque”: this sentence of the pioneer William H.F. Talbot (1800-1877), who discovered the latent image - compared by Paul Valéry with the emergence of worms perfect out of the “inner language” -, could be contresigned by any gifted amateur of some sensitivity. “Art” is not whereas the pretext with “associations of purely individual ideas”. While the cinema, which, to the eyes of the layman, passed a long time to be only “photograph moving”, has already, and for a long time, its statute of art, for which one invented since 1920 a “tenth MUSE”, photography, after one century and half of existence, remains marked tares of its birth.

1. Firt discussions, first mistakes

We can enumerate three of the tares which marked the beginnings of photography: contradiction between its origins of nature experimental, scientific, in any case free from ideas preconceived on the role of the “daguerreotype”, and the appetites of “realism” to the vague direction, extra-artistic appetites of the public; exhausting the controversy which was established from the start to know a priori if photography were an art, if it destroyed art as the painter Paul Delaroche affirmed it since 1839 or if it could remain without being defined between these two positions; finally the fact that, last the “heroic” period about which one will speak only briefly, the photographers themselves never have, except extremely rare exception, sought to be defined beyond some vague and not very effective proclamations of “originality”, up to one very recent time (which coincided besides with their least chance to be made recognize as artists, because of the increase striking down in the number of the amateurs). It is notable that this phenomenon occurred inside the market governed by the laws of capitalism in time when, even more expensive, cinematographic industry succeeded in being made accept as an art, while obeying more narrowly still the laws of this same market. It is symptomatic that the oldest today remaining daguerreotype is a “work of art” to the second degree; Jacques Daguerre had there the elements which symbolize rather well the cultural luggage which could be it his, apart from the purely scientific concerns: an ancient imitation of nymph, two heads of cherubs, a wrapped bottle of wicker, pointing out the craft industry of the artistic country par excellence, Italy, a sentimental lithography and two other plasters. This “still life”, independently of the tastes which it reveals in its author, opens a way which for a long time was hardly attended. Indeed, at the beginning of photography itself, it is the portrait which triumphs. It is essential to remember that it literally submerged all the other attempts at development of photography during several years. That means, on the aesthetic level, a desire to compete with the painters of portraits, which one knows today who at the time post-romantic the major concerns were not exactitude that their models claimed and besides obtained. The desire of exactitude in the reproduction corresponds, one often noted it, with the final rise of the middle-class (under the reign of Louis-Philippe) which prepares positivism. It is striking to note that holding them of integral realism, out of literary and pictorial matter, were wary of photography; thus, Champfleury exclaimed: “What I see between in my head, goes down in my feather and becomes what I saw [...]. The man, not being machine, cannot return the objects automatically. The novelist chooses, group, distributes; does the daguerreotype try hard so much?” Confused and naive argumentation where the concept of realism reveals its own ambiguities spontaneously (one will reproach in the same way the surrealist “automatism” for being given up with the “facility”). The sarcastic remarks of the largest esthetician of the time, Baudelaire, are of another class. How the portrait, more than the “study” - Delacroix which he likes and even severe Ingres that he admires in make! -, it aims at the first “reconstitutions” of “tragic or gracious” scenes of the history, these groups “of funny and hussies” disguised, who insult “at the same time the divine painting and the sublime art of the actor”. Realism however is not saved: “The company immonde rua, like only one Narcisse, to contemplate his commonplace image on metal.” And to the dandyism of Baudelaire comes to mix its puritanism, when it condemns the stereoscope at a rate of the embarrassing exploitation which was made at once by it by skilful tradesmen: “The love of the obscenity, which is as long-lived in the heart of the man as love of oneself, did not let escape a so beautiful occasion to be satisfied.” On a point, the memories of Nadar give reason to Baudelaire: photographic industry was the “refuge”, if not of “all the missed painters, too badly gifted or too lazy”, at least of a good number of them, and especially of representatives of this Bohemian socially unclassable, at the same time concerned of material and rubbed freedom artistic culture, where coudoyaient themselves “missed painters, missed sculptors, clerks in bankruptcy” (Nadar). Admittedly Baudelaire is unjust towards Delacroix, which in 1854 considers it regrettable that the photography “came so late”, as it had been for Charles Nègre, which about 1860 naively transposed on the fabric its excellent photographs so, supreme honor, to expose to the Living room, as it had been for more specific research of Degas. But, large or small, the painters preserve in front of photography a total attitude which explains its rapid derives from “realism” towards claims of another kind. Full with goodwill, some criticize exceeded the non-problem raised by the exactitude of the “drawings”, as Disderi (1819-1891) believes still necessary to call its tests and even its “photographic calling cards” to the patented format, which enormously lower the cost price of the “portrait”. The example of Lamartine is completely interesting, if one thinks of the real influence which its Course familiar of literature (1859) can have where, having initially pronounced a vigorous anathema against photography, it suddenly changes opinion after having seen the tests on bluish paper of “sculptor” A. Adam-Solomon. It exclaims: “Photography, it is the photographer [...]. It is better than an art, it is a solar phenomenon where the artist collaborates with the sun!” As of this time, photography is thus summoned outside to transform itself into art: juridically, it is allowed like such, “at least in certain cases”, by a decree of the Court of Appeal of Paris (Apr 10, 1862) concerning a business of “plagiarism”. The dominant esthetics which, born in France, was spread at once in all Europe, especially in Great Britain, ratifies the misinterpretation which the expression pictorial photography summarizes. Thus, Nadar - pseudonym of G.F. Tournachon (1820-1910) -, whose certain remarks announce those that the theorists of the “new objectivity will hold” after 1920, is seen decreeing the title of “Titien of photography”, because it also uses “to him” very beautiful velvety blacks in its portraits - what testifies as much to an ignorance of the genius of Titien that his clean. Nadar takes the first air photography in 1858, the first underground photography in 1861; in 1886, it is the first “photographic interview”, where it is made take vis-a-vis the scientist Chevreul centenary; it is necessary to still quote its effigies of Nerval, Baudelaire and Dumas, inter alia.

2. The “escape out of reality”

At that time where the stakes of impressionism are posed occurs a vice of effects of blur, final improvements, complicated chemical treatments, the purpose of which are all acknowledged or unavowed to make it possible photography to compete with painting. The vogue of the new art follows the curve of the general evolution of the company: triumphing positivism a certain “escape succeeds” towards historical phantasms or symbolic systems which are used as counterweight with new problems. At the same time as of innumerable photographers drown their models in the fogs more or less sophisticated where, Bernard Shaw in 1902 will say, “the figures become suddenly indistinct and nonsubstantial, in a way as not very convincing as irrational”, the modern style relaying impressionism, others multiply sets able to compete with those painted by Thomas Couture or Ernest Meissonier. One represents using actors Don Quichotte in his library, or even of the allegorical scenes in the taste of the préraphaélites; H.P. Robinson, whose theoretical works (Picture Making by Photography) will be republished until 1916, did not hesitate to draw vast paperboards, grouping several figures heavily symbolic systems, before carrying them out in its studio using alive models; J.C. Strauss, in Germany manufactures of Frans Hals “on order”; F. Boissonas, in Geneva, pastiche (inter alia) Honore Daumier! In comparison, underhand erotism of the reverend Charles Dodgson, alias Lewis Carroll, guard all his freshness, if one thinks that the childish models that it made pose around the topics of Alice to the country of the wonders often did not have for them that the charm of their age. There is no solution of continuity between its work with legendary half (itself destroyed the major part of it) and, beyond the artistic photographs “naked” the laboriously manufactured one since the daguerreotype, according to the taste of each generation, research of authentic artists such as Hans Bellmer (the Headstock, 1936, series of variations), Man Ray, or certain Anglo-American photographers, such Bill Brandt. Thanks to them, the erotism became an authentic component of the esthetics of the light. Thus, about 1860-1900, no ground of discussion was offered which made it possible to the best photographers - in particular Parisian “documentarists” - to continue as artists. The most interesting research remains of a scientific nature (rifle chronophotographic of Étienne Jules Marey, which breaks up the movement, announcing the cinema) or exaspèrent the tendency to “imaginary” (unquestionable spiritistic “photograph” phantom and ectoplasms; Fixed Auguste Strindberg on the plates its experiments of alchemy thanks to the overprinting) in time even where the objective, clinging to the telescope or the microscope, reveals, beyond the utility role that Baudelaire assigned to him in these fields, of new beauties “in a rough state”. 3. End of photography-painting Although also influenced by the style of the British photographers, American photography had had its own evolution, marked in particular by a very sharp taste of the reports, which culminates with the admirable documents on the American Civil War due to Mathew Brady, Alexander Gardner and Timothy Sullivan, where the scenario writers of westerns will regularly come to seek sources of inspiration. About 1900 however, the “international style” (exported to Japan) included the documentary truth in the rhetoric of the effects: the “matter” (papers of luxury, final improvements by suppression or addition of details, etc) took precedence over the light. It is the time when a esthetician, Robert of Sizeranne, exclaimed: “Photography exceeded the promises of science; it had promised only truth to us, it gave us the beauty”, confusing with this one a vice of tricks (dichromate gum, fatty inks) which pastichent the charcoal, the aquatinte or the washing. About 1907, the American Alfred Stieglitz broke brutally, thanks to a precise theoretical argumentation, with “artistic” photography. Having created, since 1902, a dissenting group of the Camera Club of New York, it condemns not only the final improvement, but the enlarging: it works with a portable apparatus, even under the most difficult conditions (photographs taken in snow). In 1910, an art gallery opens its doors with its group (Photo-Secession), however that Stieglitz plays a part of foreground in the diffusion of paintings cubists in the United States: one could say that it photographs some sometimes undertook to make cubism according to nature. The choice of apparently dehumanized subjects, the importance of framing, the introduction of repetitive elements intended to support the impression of rate/rhythm or on the contrary the juxtaposition (for example of large letters of poster and an angle of leprous wall) explain why Picasso has, in its turn, recognized a research close to his in its work. But it is not a question of a banal transposition of the sights cubists by another medium: in 1921, Stieglitz leaves to the conquest the “pure” photography which rests, to each test, in each “plan”, the same problem: “a maximum of details for a maximum of simplification”, that it less solves in a “realistic” direction, as one could believe it, than Platonic. It photographs clouds which it calls of the “songs of the sky” and of the “equivalents of emotion”. The Photo-Secession group had only a few years of existence, but it is thanks to him that the originality of photography like artistic medium could be marked without return. Independently of their particular concerns, the artists who composed it indeed introduced the problem of the illusion of reality, problem today in the center of many discussions of the theorists of the cinema. Their activity was in a field where this problem was not encumbered by the data concerning “continuity” in the space and the time, which affect cinematographic criticism today. On the other hand, it is notable that Paul Strand, the most gifted photographer that about 1916 the Photo-Secession revealed, passed in a second part of his career to the film corealisation. It brought there the same power, the same party taken to reach essence starting from a banal or quasi abstract detail: “Objectivity is the genuine gasoline of photography, its contribution to art and also its limitation. The problem of the photographer is to clearly see the limits and the potentialities of its medium.” With him “pure” photography joined the dumb life of the objects: “If you are alive, a vegetable, a barrier mean something for you.



Die Welt STI schön (“the world is beautiful”), this title of a album-proclamation of the German photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch (1928), reveals well the internal contradiction of the “illusion of reality”: Renger-Patzsch condemns any faking, any research of the “effects”, all the more remarkable attitude as it is almost contemporary crisis expressionnist of the German cinema; but while privileging more subtly than the Masters of the Photo-Secession such detail of nature (a branch in flowers, a heap of old stones), it introduces the thesis according to which the beauty of the world depends on the choice made by the eye which looks at it. The photographic image, by its “objectivity” or its “mechanical character”, which is that answers best the remark of Spinoza: “I allot to nature neither beauty nor ugliness, convinced that I am that the things are beautiful or ugly only compared to our imagination (faculty to create images).” A third current of this time is represented by the researchers who are at the origin of the first “abstract” stereotypes completely. Since 1913, Alvin Coburn breaks traditional space by its sights in diving of New York and especially by its triangle of mirrors placed in front of the objective. The painter Christian Schad obtains in Zurich, in 1918, of the images without camera in illuminant of the objects posed on significant surface. In Bauhaus, László Moholy-Nagy remains attached to graphics. However these three currents converge towards an “etymological” definition of the photographic art: it would be a “description of the light” by itself, the support (prone, material pseudo-pictorial) being gradually tiny room to the state of pretext. The emotion or the reflexion would have to even be born from the luminosity. It is from this point of view that it is necessary to appreciate the rather exceptional theoretical contribution of Man Ray. With him, the divorce between painting and photography are paradoxically consumed, since it uses the two techniques, by radically excluding them one from the other. By its invention of the “rayographes”, photography does not have any more a support of the whole and, according to its beautiful formula, there is “the new one under the sun”. If it is being at the same time excellent and meticulous portraitist and the author of “technical” successes which must much with pure poetic imagination, it is not only with the influence of the Photo-Secession, of dadaism and of surrealism that it must, it is also with this conferred freedom, according to its own statements, by a “practice absolutely familiar of the trade”. Freedom which recently enabled him to turn over its proclamation of 1937: “Photography is not art” while saying: “Art is not photography.” Cultivated by amateurs as of the origins, the photomontage and the photocollage which lead to lend to a preliminary unreal composition “all appearances of something of reality which was photographed”, were integrated from the start in the current of renewal of the forms which started with the cubism and during the period 1910-1920. From a sometimes hard imagination, they passed to political propaganda with John Heartfield and El Lissitsky. The prevalent tendency since 1930 combines a certain poetic taste, even fantastic, taste of the strangeness, with the social realism, which finds the verism of Eugene Atget (1857-1927), the acuity of the “new glance” not excluding an artistic will. That one thinks of the school Czechoslovakian, remained remarkably faithful to the surrealist influences of his origins (1935), and better still in Brassaï (1899-1984), precursor of all the current French school, which mixes freshness with the emotion with humour and picturesque social, in particular, at Izis and Robert Doisneau. This last tendency at the same time “is sublimated” and exceeded by Henri Cartier-Bresson (born in 1908), who integrates his plastic concerns into the report, conceived like a research of the “decisive moment”, excluding the anecdote and transferring the instantaneous one to the permanent one.

4. Trend(Tendency) the most recent

After the backward flow of “pure photography”, a convenient simplification consisted in classifying the photographs in “abstract” and “realistic”. But this simplification violated the inevitable phenomenologic relation: there are not two reports/ratios different from the eye (or the objective) to an object whatever it is. At most it was seen supplanted by its own image at a rate of the “deformation” of this one. Many modern painters were subject to the influence of “page-settings” of photographers however realistic, but who cut out space in an unexpected way. As Rene Huyghe noted it about 1950, the objective for of “eye of fish” (eye-fish) immediately carries out the spherical prospect which required formerly painters of hard calculations and short cuts cunning. The dispersion of the current tendencies was accentuated under the effect of extra-artistic events. The first is placed before the Second World war: it is the birth of the great report, with all the constraints which it involves and also its possibilities of “return to the subject” more or less with feeling, but also if necessary deeply human, such as Robert Capa (1913-1954) imposed it, witness of the tragedies of our time. A little later, at least with regard to the reflexion of the photographers on their activity, one attends the development of the photography known as scientific, which had already modified the aesthetic sensitivity by revealing unknown aspects of the Universe. This one allowed creation (at the price of light fakings, like the “catch continues”) images which, by their strange aspect, acquire an aesthetic value. More recently, it let play the imagination of some creators, starting from structures studied under all the aspects, such the “adventures of matters” of Jean-Pierre Sudre (1962). It is necessary to evoke, finally, the push of “subjectivism” which, at the end of the Second World war, caused the attempts at Otto Steinert (1915-1978) creating in 1949 the Fotoform group (it was flattered to increase the field of photography and to even reverse the step of it in “going up” psychological analysis until the image) and those, frankly irrational, of Minor White (1908-1976), whose “mirages” communicate to rare forms unexpected significances and influenced a whole group of American photographers who believe in the “magic” possibilities of the objective. The color could have appeared a determining element of renewal of photographic esthetics. Enough curiously, the artists was a long time reticent in its connection, showing it “to distort” the purely plastic reports/ratios suggested or underlined by the “black and white”. More spectacular than really conclusive, Essays d' Erwin Fieger (born in 1913) announce an extreme attempt to violate this taboo, using “phantasmagoric” receipts which are unaware of reality deliberately. Perhaps it is about a non-problem, due to a kind of timidity in front of a whole of processes which, announced since 1869 and independently one of the other by Charles Cros and Louis Ducos de Hauron, were developed with chances of infallibility only during the time 1940-1950. The example of Gjon Mili (1904-1984) shows that the passage from one “technique” to another does not modify ipso facto an aesthetic design. When it photographs colors the jump of a frog in water, or Picasso drawing in the air with a flashlight, or the “successive installations” of a dancer moving, it continues to want “to contradict” the word of Brassaï: “Photography is the opposite of the movement.” The same tendency is found in the young Italian school (Fontana) which stylizes to the extreme of the fragments of reality and obtains an equivalent of “paysagism abstracted” with the pure colors, subtly granted or désaccordées. The opposite school all the candid photography which works in ambient light without worrying neither about the values neither of the framing nor of the angle of catch (two concepts too often confused), although being able to claim precursors such as Edward Weston in 1937, aims in fact “to exceed” any aesthetic quarrel. It is interesting to note that it coincides in time with the beginnings of the crisis of the American cinema. One can raise, on this subject, that the photographic anthologies of on the other side of the Atlantic often opened their pages with large “directors of the photography” (operators chiefs) of Hollywood, from which the varied styles are transposed of the screen to the ordinary objective. One of most eminent, John Alton (born in 1901), published about 1950 two theoretical works which became “bibles” on the other side of the Atlantic: Photography and Lighting and Painting with Light. Lastly, the diversity of the aesthetic tendencies underwent the “recoil” due to the apparent standardization of photography as regards cinema, mode and publicity. 5. Sociology of photography One already saw how much the development photography was related to the evolution of capitalism in France and England. As it is not astonishing as the first signs of a change of design occurred in the United States in one period when this country lived its first great crisis. The goal of Brady and his assistants was characteristic besides: to show the war to avoid its return. This tradition persisted and grows in the United States. About 1900, in fact photographic investigations bring the destruction of the slums of New York. Roosevelt will call upon famous photographers to support some of his social campaigns. Meanwhile, the example will have been followed by the U.S.S.R., on scale quantitatively less but aesthetically such an interesting, especially because of the influence of futuristic and modernistic during the first years which followed the revolution of October. This use of photography like social tool was later on victim of its diffusion even and the conditions of commercial operating of the great report. It is however necessary to recall the splendid exposure of “planetary sociology” organized in New York by a veteran of the Photo-Secession, Edward Steichen, in 1955: The Family of Man. It selected there, on two million tests received from 68 countries, 503 photographs which constitute the panorama of contemporary humanity, “condemned” to the unit and fraternity. One can consider the sociology of photography in opposite direction, i.e. by taking the point of view of the public. It was noticed that the request had been limited very a long time to the portrait, to which were added rudiments of information (portraits of celebrities, “picturesque” sights) and certain social requirements (photographs of group). This request could not have in theory of artistic exit, and it persisted by maintaining a craft industry; but it in addition completely changed under the influence of other activities, primarily publicity and the fashion: a typical case is that of Richard Avedon who, large photographer of mode, became a portraitist in turn moving (Marylin Monroe) and extremely wild for some of its models belonging to the “high society”. For a long time there was not in Europe of very real request with regard to the photography conceived like an independent art (single tests or with limited pulling). It is probably because each one thinks of being able to be a photographer and that the material required to be it is acquired easily: since 1968, more half of the French hearths had an apparatus. Reciprocally, the majority of the professionals, after having had to support to see illustrations drawn or engraved “according to a photograph” by pseudo-artistic prejudice, in general agreed to sell their photographs at agencies which always did not mention their signature; but since the years the 1980 photographs of agency are not anonymous any more. A number growing of them try to become their clean “producers” to maintain their copyright on their works. The teaching of photography exists in the United States, but it is absent or embryonic almost everywhere else. There still, one can note that the assimilation, indefensible in healthy logic, of the cinema with photography finds a justification practical in the fact that the majority of the photo hobbyists tend to be transformed into scenario writers amateurs. The empirical statute of the fixing of the “privileged” moment - this moment was a fragment of object - is taken again and denied by the desire to fix “at the same time” the moment and the movement which is its negation. As well with regard to its social diffusion as for the few aesthetic reflexions as it caused, photography seems thus condemned to vegetate in margin of the medium much more powerful which developed from it.

The art and digital collage

A new aesthetic collage with digital technology
New technologies are winning over more and more artists who are dedicated to where the art of collage or painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography. They use digital technology as a tool in the context of their artistic production. Often the use of this technology is so subtle that it is difficult to distinguish between digital and analog.
Digital allows manipulation and combinations of several techniques such as photography or video is sometimes an art lover finds it difficult to distinguish the different mediums used.
The appropriation and collage techniques that have their roots in Cubist, the dadaists and surrealists in the early twentieth century, already enjoy a long history, the digital has opened up new horizons. Thanks to digital technology, new opportunities open for artists to the art of collage and technology composites. The invisibility of fittings simulates a new reality and gives these images a very new, where the elements were not real transitions between them.

Collages and digital composite images have marked a turning focusing erasing borders. Among the artists who are increasingly using the computer to create complex is the American actor Scott Griesbach art multimedia collage.


By remaining in the art of collage and venturing into that of the image advertising. The latter is no longer a simple representation of a mark but the image carries a concept or a value. Digital technology has contributed greatly to the development of this "consumer culture" of images and art often refers to this theme.
Widely used in the advertising digital collage also calls into question the realism by making it possible realities simulated where hyper realities. The fact that we can also compose a digital image by combining realities of different art forms tends to blur the boundaries between mediums, including painting and photography. The textures are created by printing ink jet on suitable media that rival paint brush.
The elements of the process of composing, writing software, the use of software remain forms of expression that s apparentent the work of collagistes papers but who brings a signature aesthetic entirely new.

Photomontage and assembly

History and Future Directions
It was in 1910 that the German Dadaïsts Georg Grosz, John Heartfiled , , Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoöch have the first use of photomontage in reaction to the painting which he denounces the increasing abstraction. These photomontages are part of the will to protest and shock. This new art in 1920 is regarded as a major form of modern realism. Indeed photomontage reconciles imitation and composition.
That view dominates in the middle of Berlin Dadaist who opposes German Expressionism, which is a dominating power, reducing the figure of the artist to that of the image editor (Hausmann, Heartfield), close to the technician , against a devout vision of art and against sensible figure of the artist creator. Blend, off, poem, poster are all practices that put deconstructivist derided art and his claims. Heartfield evolve into a new kind of producer of art: the artist activist whose work is entirely driven by its function, its social purpose. At Hausmann one is in a playful space, in a consciousness that agrees to submit to the impulse visual imagination and automated. At John Heartfield, photomontage leads to a class. It articulates them pieces of a real outbreak, in order to make intelligible to that plunged into chaos in the world. It represents the removal from the point of view of the bourgeois class to the benefit of the proletariat. In the Soviet photomontage ( El Lissitzky , Alexander Rodtchenko ) is a space-perspectiviste and anti-naturalist, combining text and visual. It aims to have on the viewer the greatest possible action. The photomontage is tilted in its entirety by language: in Dadaist poem Hausmann, political slogan among Heartfield and the Soviets. At Hausmann the title does not change the meaning of the table but, as part of the collage, opens up a space to the subjectivity of each. At Heartfield slogan and it is injunction, which is extracted from speech, proverb or quote, as a piece of reality glued to the reality that piece of the picture. In Soviet there is a real sensitivity to the letters of alphabets and typography.

The collage was soon applied to photography through photomontage in the aesthetic of the fragment and shock. There are also attempting to cross painting, photography and drawing, photography and writing.

The collage is conceived as a means to penetrate the lines within a single image from reality (with Brecht: the image alone does not put enough emphasis on the World, only the introduction of extra photographic elements
The effectiveness of photomontage art is not limited by the photographic recording. The assembly is designed to make situations irreprésentables photographically. He is working to raise public awareness in the new social and political situations as well as the caricature. The gap and the detour artifice are facilitated by digital technology.
The digital photomontage operates a passage in the world of cut paper, glue and assembly manual to a World logical-mathematical that enables artists photomontage to tap into a set of images larger and accessible. The world of photomontage ignored the matter and move to a digital infinitely calculable. If the digital photography sees its documentary value compromised by the processing techniques and concealment much easier. The digital photomontage that was already in the pastiche, amalgam, the sensitive copes very well with digital.
But with the development of digital images are all, regardless of their source, something in common. Un air de famille, which is difficult to describe but helps unify the area and to provide air kinship to all images passing through the computer. This style digital is quite present in the photomontage advertising.
But photomontage remains for the artists a way to offer condensed and simultaneous situations and developing a new creativity.