Photomontage Today. Peter Kennard - ACE125.5

SECTION 3 Driving past long rows of advertising hoardings, and rows of posters beside an Underground escalator. VO reading "The imaginary discourse of commerce occupies more and more of our city’s walls. It unwinds street by street, hardly interrupted by the ends of the avenues…" Caption: "3 Using/effecting." Kennard. John Heartfield’s top-hatted hyena War and Corpses - the Last Hope of the Rich (1932). Commentary says that Kennard’s work can be traced back to that of John Heartfield in the 1930s, and links to that of other people working today, such as Klaus Staeck in West Germany. Example of Staeck’s work, and similar images by Kennard. Commentary says Staeck refuses to sign his work and reproduces it in large quantity so that the posters "cannot become valued as individual works of art". Mass production offers economy of scale so that a complete exhibition can be cheaper than a single art print: examples include Mona Lisa in a wheelchair with English caption, Nobody’s perfect, superimposed. Staeck’s work is widely available and much used. Caption "‘Use art to make reality by producing conflict.’ Staeck." Work of Peter Dunn and Lorraine Leeson. The National Health Service Thirty Years On… Health Before Profits. Commentary talks about their "working directly with particular communities on specific issues", trying "to be both popular and explanatory". Other health-service-related image. Commentary says their work is distributed through Trades Councils and Health Service Trades Union branches to interested groups. People making collages. Kennard’s VO on working with a range of groups, saying how even the act of cutting out images will make people see them differently and thus begin to think differently about their relationship to society. Caption: "Images in Circulation." Kennard talking about the need to circulate new images as widely as possible. He shows examples of books covers (John Downing’s The Media Machine, Lesley Doyal’s The Political Economy of Health, Martin Ryle’s The Politics of Nuclear Disarmament) which require simple, strong images; postcards; cheaply produced pamphlets like Richard Sissons’s NO Nuclear Weapons; magazine covers for New Society, Camerawork, Voluntary Action, Viewpoint, New Scientist, etc, and articles in The Guardian, Peace News, etc. Posters: Kennard’s No to Nuclear Weapons, Solidarnosc, the Polish Solidarity Campaign, and others. Caption: "Uses of an image." Kennard talking about making a collage for a 1980 Labour party anti-nuclear march, and shows how he made the broken missile in fist image, and the various ways it was used. Caption: "Anti-nuclear montages." Kennard on the lack of debate on nuclear war. Mushroom cloud map of UK; skeleton reading Protect and Survive booklet; CND symbol cutting missile, and several others pinned up on a fence. Anti-nuclear demonstration. Kennard talking about conventional media juxtapositions, and says that "montage is an attempt to turn these disparate elements into a visual language of opposition". Credits. Final image of fist smashing television.