John Heartfield:

John Heartfield was born on the 19th of June, 1891, and died on the 26th April 1968.He remains the best known and revered as a result of his single-minded devotion to anti-Nazi Political activism. He was working in Germany between the two world wars, and developed an innovative method of appropriating and reusing photographs to powerful political effect. Heartfield pioneered photomontage and used the technique of cutting up and combining photographic images to strong political effect. His most famous works were powerful satirical attacks on Hitler and the Nazi’s. Heartfield combined radical art of the avant-garde artistic movement of Berlin Dada with revolutionary politics. At a time of uncertainty, Heartfield’s agitated images forecasted and reflected the chaos Germany experienced in the 1920’s and 1930’s, as it slipped towards social and political catastrophe.
Photomontage allowed Heartfield to create loaded and politically contentious images. To compose his works, he chose recognisable press photographs of politicians or events from the mainstream illustrated press. He them dissembled and rearranged these images to radically alter their meaning.
Whereas other Dada exponents of montages produced art, for Heartfield his output has the appearance of newspaper photographs.
For Heartfield, the definition of photomontage was wider than most peoples, and he insisted it should include a single photo with caption, since text and image interacted with each other in a similar way to multiple images. Many of John Heartfield’s best work utilise famous quotes of leading Nazi’s and undermine the intended message by ingenious visual puns.

Many of Heartfield’s photomontages appeared in the magazine, ‘’Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (Worker’s illustrated magazine) (AIZ). Heartfield began his regular contributions to the AIZ with this image. This was a staged photograph rather than a proper photomontage. To create it, Heartfield covered up a mannequin’s head with pages from two newspapers. As a result, the figure is literally blinded by the prejudices of these newspapers. The blurring at the left, reinforces the idea of impaired vision.