Photomontage

The first and most famous mid-Victorian photomontage (then called combination printing) was "The Two Ways of Life" (1857) by Oscar Rejlander,[3] followed shortly thereafter by the images of photographer Henry Peach Robinson such as "Fading Away" (1858).

In late Victorian North America, William Notman of Montreal used photomontage to commemorate large social events which could not otherwise be captured on film.

The high point of its popularity came, however, during World War I, when photographers in France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, and Hungary produced a profusion of postcards showing soldiers on one plane and lovers, wives, children, families, or parents on another.

[5] Many of the early examples of fine-art photomontage consist of photographed elements superimposed on watercolours, a combination returned to by (e.g.) George Grosz in about 1915.

Continuing to produce anti-fascist art in Czechoslovakia until 1938, Heartfield's political photomontages earned him the number five position on the Gestapo's Most Wanted List.

Its influence also spread to Japan where avant-garde painter Harue Koga produced photomontage-style paintings based on images culled from magazines.

[16] A later term coined in Europe was, "photocollage", which usually referred to large and ambitious works that added typography, brushwork, or even objects stuck to the photomontage.

Parallel to the Germans, Russian Constructivist artists such as El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, and the husband-and-wife team of Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina created pioneering photomontage work as propaganda, such as in the journal USSR in Construction, for the Soviet government.

In Argentina during the late 1940s, the German exile, Grete Stern, began to contribute photomontage work on the theme of Sueños (Dreams), as part of a regular psychoanalytical article in the magazine, Idilio.

The American photographer Alfred Gescheidt, while working primarily in advertising and commercial art in the 1960s and 1970s, used photomontage techniques to create satirical posters and postcards.

20th century Xerox technology made possible the ability to copy both flat images and three-dimensional objects using the copier as a scanning camera.

Creating a photomontage has, for the most part, become easier with the advent of computer software such as Adobe Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, Corel Photopaint, Pixelmator, Paint.NET, or GIMP.

Yet some artists are pushing the boundaries of digital image editing to create extremely time-intensive compositions that rival the demands of the traditional arts.

The amateur scrapbooker can turn home projects into professional output, such as CDs, DVDs, displays on television, uploads to a website for viewing, or assemblies into one or more books for sharing.