Linder in Conversation with Dawn Ades

Photomontage

Dawn Ades: We met for the first time at the Hannah Höch exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery about a year ago and talked about photomontage and collage and the relationship between these two terms. I had been trying to suggest that there is something special about photomontage, but you may not agree?

Linder: I think that there is something very special about photomontage and it’s all thanks to you that I became so familiar with both the term and the technique, almost forty years ago, in 1976 in fact, when Photomontage was published. What influences were at play then to persuade you to use that term?

DA: I wrote the book with the idea of drawing attention to photomontage, not as a subdivision of collage but as a thing in its own right. It’s not just a technique, a technical process, either. Collage to me is a much more general term which refers to the process of sticking whatever material –sand, string, cigarette packets and so on – onto a backing, as in Cubist collage. It was a kind of challenge to the imitation function of painting – here’s the real thing. Photomontage, on the other hand, has to do with given images, photographs in whatever form, cutting and recombining them. I think photomontage has to be allowed its own special existence. I feel your work belongs to photomontage very clearly.

L: In 1976, when I first began to cut up photographs and reassemble them, I always described the act as photomontage. Over the years, writers and curators have described what I do as collage – I eventually acquiesced, but I think that now it’s time to be more specific again. What sort of curatorial conversations did you have at the Whitechapel regarding Höch’s work?

DA: We had a lot of debate during the preparation for the Höch exhibition. It became clear that the term photomontage has been re-absorbed into the term collage. But Höch did call it photomontage herself. The term was chosen very deliberately by the Berlin Dadaists. It had to do with the photograph, with the German term monteur , meaning engineer or fitter, and with filmic montage – all these were coming together. The Berlin Dadaists chose to call themselves monteurs rather than artists. They were responding to a new image-world of mechanical production and reproduction. It was a move to distinguish their activity from collage, which was, in a sense, already part of a modernist tradition with Cubism. So it seemed important to me that we should use the term photomontage, especially for Höch’s earlier work, but they said, ‘No, no, no – people will get confused. They won’t know what that means. We have to say “collage”.’ So throughout the exhibition this was the medium given on the labels. It was a great exhibition, though.

L: Maybe this conversation will in some way redress the prevailing confusion? I remember the impact Photomontage had on me when I first saw it in 1976 in Grass Roots Books, the only left-wing bookshop in Manchester. The Herbert Bayer cover was somehow at odds with the other books there, When God Was a Woman (1976) and Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971). Grass Roots was a very important part of my life, they stocked books and magazines that you couldn’t find anywhere else. I used to go there several times a week and read as much as I could; I’ve no idea how they survived for so long because so few of us could afford to buy anything. The £2.50 price tag for your book seems incredibly low now, but at the time it meant saving up for at least two weeks in order to be able to buy it. There was always a time lag between desire and acquisition; we all learned to wait patiently for books, records and new shoes. I recently recalled how many decades it can sometimes take, and how much patience you have to have, to find the right books, the right people, to make the right connections. I presume that younger generations have an accelerated mode of research. Today’s online connection to the world makes it a lot easier to delve into the collective pool of knowledge.

Your book resembled a paginated photomontage, with time and place deftly glued together by your writing and research. I loved the economy of the title and the economy of the technique. I had already started cutting up photographs in 1976 and gluing them together in different configurations, trying to explore how pliable the template of the culture around me really was. I had read John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), so I knew that everything that was reproduced via the halftone dot had in some way been engineered. Hence the aptness of the term monteur – I made my early photomontages with the same curiosity as a mechanic lifting up the bonnet of a malfunctioning car.

Photomontage gave me the confidence to follow the technique with great purity. It helped develop the ambition to one day take my place within that lineage of visual engineers. I had a new word upon my tongue –photomontage – it was my mantra before I even knew what a mantra was.

DA: Were there any particular artists or groups of artists that you found in Photomontage who spoke to you particularly directly?

L: I was already familiar with a lot of the artists – Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, El Lissitzky, Raoul Hausmann and Max Ernst, to name some names. As a student I had left to right

Principle of Totality ( Version I ) , 2012

Untitled, 1979 pp. 24–25

Untitled, 1978