Photomontage Today. Peter Kennard - ACE125.3

SECTION 1 Kennard’s home. Magazines and newspapers. Colour supplements. VO reading "The streams of images we encounter every day move on the threshold of consciousness. News from afar. Pictures of ourselves. News of distant people and places…" Caption: "1 Defining." Commentary says "Photomontage works by combining separate images to produce new meanings… When two images are combined, their meanings interact to produce a third meaning." 1933 montage, A Pan German, by John Heartfield, combines an image of Julius Streicher with that of a murder victim. Peter Kennard has combined John Constable’s The Hay Wain with Cruise missiles in Say No to Cruise Missiles (1980) to comment on plans to put missiles on mobile transporters. Ironic comment by Margaret Bourke White (1937) in which she photographed a queue of black flood victims in Louisville in front of a billboard image of a white family in car which proclaimed "World’s Highest Standard of Living… There’s no way like the American Way". Photograph from London street (1980) juxtaposing advertisement for stockings with Christian Aid poster. Eton pupils and local boys, from Picture Post, 1941, illustrating article "The Two Nations". Commentary asks questions about this composition. Caption: "Montages which do not work." Kennard says some of his own montages didn’t work because the contradictions in the images weren’t strong enough. Examples. Kennard comments on a page of photographs from the Sunday Times. Caption: "Images are nothing… It’s the relationships between the images that matter." Examples, including USSR: Russische Ausstellung poster by Lazar (El) Lissitzky (1929). Commentary lists some reasons why photomontage has been used: Surrealist explorations of the unconscious, Russian constructivism, etc. This programme is concerned solely with photomontage "which deliberately constructs the juxtaposition of imagery with the aim of understanding the world politically", gives an example of the work of John Heartfield (1932), Spitzenproduktie des Kapitalismus / The Finest Productions of Capitalism, a bride next to unemployed man wearing placard saying "Nehme jede Arbeit an!". Commentary proceeds to deconstruct the meaning of this image, asks what images could be used to produce similar contrasts today, and whether or not photomontage is actually effective at expressing complex statements. Film of reflection of Asprey’s jewellers against rest of street scene, adding, in caption, the cost of the piece of jewellery in the window. Colour supplement images. Commentary says that dominant media keep images of wealth and power in different social groups "rigidly separate" from each other. There’s no relation between "different realities". Advertisement for Air India, with caption read as VO, compared with image of airport cleaner with ironic caption. Commentary says "Photomontage counteracts the convenient separation of different aspects of the world." Kennard explains one of his pictures, a comment on the Junta in Chile, which compares the military to a slaughter-house. Commentary says that the "third meaning" is "the brutality of oppression", and goes on to talk about Eisenstein and his theories of montage. Stills from Strike / Stachka (1925). Caption: "‘A work of art, understood dynamically, is just this process of arranging images in the feelings and mind of the spectator’. Eisenstein." Eisenstein’s theories influenced many iflm-makers, including Fernando Solanos’s La Hora de los Hornos / The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) in which the slaughter-house is juxtaposed with images from advertisements.