ABSTRACT
Around the time that John Heartfield was developing the language of political photomontage, another artist, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, was using photography in conjunction with drawn geometric shapes. The effect was to cause a visual conflict between the print viewed as a factual record of three-dimensional reality and the print as a two-dimensional surface pattern. This important work ensured that many contemporary artists would continue to use the camera as a creative tool. Some have found ‘straight photography’ limited as a medium for visualising their own personal ideas or abstract concepts within a single image. Image manipulation and photomontage are two ways that photography can be used by the artist to communicate in more complex ways.
