World Of Art Series Photomontage [Paperback]

The art of photomontage must be one of the best & most direct ways of rendering the surreal quality of dreams in tangible form. This fine volume is a perfect introduction to the history of the art, with examples from the dawn to photography to the present. For those wanting to understand & appreciate photomontage in general, to those hoping to their hand at it for the first time, you can't do better than these incredibly unreal (yet more-real-than-real) pages. Highly recommended, and urgently in need of reprinting!

Thses books are somewhat rare.
I landed a clean library copy from Europe.

If you are a montage artist, or are looking for inspiration, this is your book.

Good color illustrations & detailed descriptions about the artists & movements

I thought this would be a general book about photographs combined in the camera or darkroom (double exposures, combined negatives etc.) as art, but it focuses mostly on early (19-teens through 1930s) combinations of printed photos from newspapers or magazines pasted together and then rephotographed. "Photomontage," the book explained, was originally a specific term introduced by the Dadaist art group in Berlin after the first World War. Many photomontage artists used their work for political commentary; in Germany, for instance, they made a lot of anti-Hitler pieces (for instance, making a nice visual pun out of Hitler's slogan, "Millions stand behind me," by representing the "millions" as a giant German capitalist putting coins into Hitler's upraised hand), whereas in Russia, photomontage was frequently put to use in pro-government propaganda. The rapid growth of cities and technology was another popular theme.

I would recommend this book (and/or what is probably a reprint of it, Photomontage (World of Art)) to students of early photography, the Dada movement, and/or art used for social/political commentary; to those who, like myself, are more interested in dreamlike, Surrealist-style combinations of images, not so much, although a few of these are included. The text material is informative and the selection of pictures is interesting and copious for a book of this size. All pictures are in black and white, but this is not a major drawback because color was probably not a predominant feature of the originals (if it appeared at all).