Composite Image Making

Ways in which conventional photographic techniques are used to manipulate images:

• Blending images together
• Airbrushing - Spot healing tool
• Patch Tool - Changes texture 
• Colour contrast  
• Burn and dodge tool

Research

Hannah Höch was not only a rare female practicing prominently in the arts in the early part of the twentieth century - near unique as a female active in the Dada movement that coalesced in her time - she also consciously promoted the idea of women working creatively more generally in society. She explicitly addressed in her pioneering artwork in the form of photomontage the issue of gender and the figure of woman in modern society. Her transformation of the visual elements of others by integrating them into her own larger creative projects evidenced a well-developed early example of "appropriation" as an artistic technique.

Höch was a key progenitor of the self-conscious practice of collaging diverse photographic elements from different sources to make art. This strategy of combining formerly unrelated images to make sometimes startling, sometimes insightful connections was one that came to be adopted by many Dada and Surrealist artists of her era, and also by later generations of "post-modern" conceptual artists in other media, including sculptural installations, mixed media and moving images, as well as in still photography.

Höch also helped expand the notion of what could be considered art by incorporating found elements of popular culture into "higher" art. She was one of many Dadaists to take advantage of such means, but she was both among the first, and one of the most self-consciously explicit in describing the goals and effects of doing so.

A political iconoclast, she actively critiqued prevailing society in her work, and, implicitly, through many of her life choices. Her active interest in challenging the status of women in the social world of her times motivated a long series of works that promoted the idea of the "New Woman" in the era.

Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performance produced by dada artists is often satirical and nonsensical in nature. Dada artists felt the war called into question every aspect of a society capable of starting and then prolonging it – including its art. Their aim was to destroy traditional values in art and to create a new art to replace the old. Dada was not so much a style of art like Cubism or Fauvism; it was more a protest movement with an anti-establishment manifesto.

Hannah Hoch, 1992

This image is a self portrait. She is seen to be holding scissors because she is a collage artist, but her face is not in proportion and her body is much smaller than her head. This is linked with  how women are objectified and constantly expected to act and look a certain way, usually never feeling enough to meet society's expectations. This could suggest that the scissors have a deeper meaning, referring to how she has cut her face apart and altered it in order to create the art, the same way that women often wear make up or get surgery to change their facial features and fit societies standards of beauty. She has also included an envelope behind her head with a postage stamp which seems to have no straight forward meaning but is up for interpretation by the viewer. She often used this strategy of combining formerly unrelated images to make sometimes startling, sometimes insightful connections.

1. I used the quick selection took to select the outside of the duck
2. Then I selected the invert selection to cut out the background
3. I clicked 'cmd' and 'c' to copy the duck 
4. Once on the image of the river Thames I clicked 'cmd' and 'v' to paste the duck into this image
5. Then I select 'cmd' and 'T' and the shift key so that I am able to resize the duck
6. Then I select the 'mask' option to rub out the bottom of the duck so it appears to be floating in the water