In 1932, the German artist John Heartfield published a photomontage in the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (Workers' Illustrated Newspaper) that showed Adolf Hitler receiving a sack of money from a giant industrialist standing behind him. The caption read: "The meaning of the Hitler salute: Little man asks for big gifts." Heartfield had cut the photographs with scissors, pasted them together on a board, and rephotographed the composite for mass reproduction. The image reached 500,000 readers. It was one of dozens of anti-Nazi photomontages Heartfield produced between 1930 and 1938, each one made by hand, each one a political weapon assembled from the raw material of news photography. Nearly a century later, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam mounted an exhibition called FAKE! Early Photo Collages and Photomontages (February to May 2026), drawing on more than 50 historical images from the museum's own collection to trace how image manipulation developed from the birth of photography to the Second World War. The exhibition's premise was that these composite images are not "fake" in any meaningful sense. They are as real as a surrealist painting or a cubist collage, produced in the imagination of the artist and expressed in the final image.
Photomontage is the technique of combining multiple photographs into a single composite image. The term was adopted by Dada artists in Berlin around 1918, derived from engineering and film editing, to distinguish the practice from traditional artistic techniques. A photomontage is not a single photograph but an assemblage of photographic fragments, cut, pasted, rephotographed, or digitally composited to create a new image that did not exist in front of the camera. The technique is as old as photography itself, but it became a deliberate artistic strategy in the 1910s and 1920s, when Dadaists in Berlin and Constructivists in Moscow used it to critique politics, media, and the supposed objectivity of the photograph.
This entry covers what photomontage is, how it emerged and developed, which artists defined it, and how it continues to shape contemporary art and image-making in 2026.
What Is Photomontage and How Does It Work?
The word "photomontage" carries the connotations of engineering and film editing. The Dada artists who adopted the term wanted to signal that they were not making art in the traditional sense. They were assembling, constructing, building images from prefabricated parts, the way an engineer assembles a machine. The term set the technique apart from painting and drawing, which start from blank canvas, and from straight photography, which captures what is in front of the lens.
Historically, photomontage was made by cutting photographs from newspapers, magazines, or prints, pasting them together on a board, and rephotographing the composite for reproduction. The seams between the fragments could be visible, as in Hannah Hoch's work, or invisible, as in the retouched composites of Soviet propaganda. The technique allowed artists to create impossible scenes: a person's head on another body, a giant object looming over a city, a political leader exposed as a puppet of industrial interests.
Varvara Stepanova, one of the most important Constructivist artists of the period, defined the technique in her 1928 essay Photomontage: "In photography, more than in other forms of communication, images must transmit the phenomena of the external world. And this places considerable responsibility on the artist. Periodicals, newspapers, book illustrations, posters, and all other types of advertising confront the artist with the urgent problem of how to record the subject in documentary terms. An approximated design cannot fulfill this challenge, this need for documentary truth. And so photomontage was born. Photomontage: the assemblage and combination of expressive elements from individual photographs." Read more at Nailya Alexander Gallery.
Origins and History
Early Manipulation (1860-1910)
The Rijksmuseum's 2026 exhibition FAKE! demonstrated that image manipulation is as old as photography itself. One popular trick shortly after the invention of photography was to show the same person twice in a single image: one half of the plate was exposed, then the subject moved, struck a different pose, and the other half was exposed. This technique was mostly used for harmless visual jokes, but it could also be employed with serious intent. The exhibition also featured a genre known as "Exaggerations" or "Tall Tales," popular during the Golden Age of picture postcards in the early 1900s. William H. Martin, known as "Dad," made photomontages depicting exaggerated scenes with out-of-scale plants and animals, like an ear of corn the length of a horse-drawn carriage, parodying the struggles of Midwestern farmers and mocking the exaggerated promises of land companies. Read more at Artblart.
Dada and the Invention of Photomontage (1916-1925)
The modernist conception of photomontage emerged from Cubist, Futurist, and Dadaist collage, in which cut-out photographs and fragments of newsprint were pasted into drawings and paintings. The technique was developed toward the end of World War I by Dadaists in Berlin, including John Heartfield, George Grosz, Johannes Bader, and Hannah Hoch. The choice of the term "photomontage" set the technique apart from traditional artistic practices. Artists and public alike realized that photomontage was charged with a new kind of conceptual clarity, poetic energy, and visual power. Flexible, fast-witted, and sharp-edged, photomontages were exceptionally effective in the context of modern mass communication. New printing systems like photogravure and lithography aided the production and distribution of such imagery in magazines and advertising. Read more at Estorick Collection.
Soviet Photomontage (1920s-1930s)
Simultaneously with the Berlin Dadaists, young Constructivist artists in Moscow began incorporating photographic images into their works. Gustav Klutsis, Varvara Stepanova, El Lissitzky, and Alexander Rodchenko pioneered a graphic language that continues to influence visual culture today. Working in illustration, typography, book design, poster design, and textile design, these artists discovered new ways to condense space, time, and information into single images, where realism and abstraction, high and low culture, and multiple narratives were mixed and layered as never before.
Innovations in graphic art developed alongside the rise of the Soviet film industry. Artists were inspired by directors like Sergei Eisenstein, whose Battleship Potemkin (1925) showed how the juxtaposition of nonsequential images could influence viewers' emotions and ideas. The term "montage" itself was borrowed from film editing, where it refers to the assembly of separate shots into a sequence. Soviet photomontage applied the same principle to static images.
The golden age of Soviet photomontage was brought to an end by World War II and the tightening of state control. In 1934, the First Congress of Soviet Writers declared socialist realism the official style of Soviet culture. Four years later, Klutsis, the father of Soviet photomontage, was arrested and executed under the order of Stalin.
Weimar Germany and Heinz Hajek-Halke (1925-1935)
In Berlin, the photographer Heinz Hajek-Halke (1898-1983) was producing photomontages of a different kind. Between 1925 and 1931, he specialized in complex darkroom techniques: capturing a sequence of movements on a plate, multiple exposure of several negatives in the enlarger or in the camera, and photo collage. By combining images from different contexts, he created dynamic compositions that drew on the montages of the surrealist avant-garde. His nude montages, his specialty between 1930 and 1932, invented new techniques like the mirror effect. The 2025 exhibition Metamorphosis: Heinz Hajek-Halke's Photomontages and New Image-Makers at Chaussee 36 in Berlin marked the 100th anniversary of his first photomontages and brought his vintage prints together with works by contemporary photomontage artists. Read more at Photography Now.
Contemporary Photomontage and Digital Practice (2000s-2026)
In the 2000s, photomontage enjoyed a revival as contemporary artists experimented with digital technology. Advances in digital photography and computer-generated special effects resulted in new kinds of composite photographic works. The Estorick Collection's exhibition Cut and Paste: European Photomontage 1920-1945 noted that "with the proliferation of online images and digital hybridisation tools, montage has remained a sign of our times."
In 2026, Fotomuseum Hilversum presented Layered Realities: Photography and Collage (May 21 to October 18, 2026), a group exhibition featuring work by sixteen contemporary artists from the Netherlands and abroad who work with collage. The exhibition showed how artists today use photography and collage as a visual language to explore themes such as identity, family history, and the role of imagery in a world flooded with visual information. The works ranged from video and installations to spatial work and textiles, always with photography as the basis. Read more at Fotomuseum Hilversum.
Key Artists and Works
John Heartfield (1891-1968)
Heartfield (born Helmut Herzfeld) was the best-known creator of political photomontages. He opposed Hitler's Nazi movement through dozens of photomontages published in the Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung, which reached a circulation of 500,000 at its peak. The Meaning of the Hitler Salute: Little Man Asks for Big Gifts (1932) shows Hitler receiving money from a giant industrialist. Adolf the Superman: Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk (1932) shows Hitler with an X-ray torso revealing coins in his stomach. Heartfield's work demonstrated that photomontage could be a weapon of political critique, using the medium of mass media against itself.
Hannah Hoch (1889-1978)
Hoch was the only woman in the Berlin Dada group and one of the inventors of photomontage. Her Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany (1919) is a large-scale photomontage that combines images of politicians, dancers, machinery, and text fragments into a chaotic but precisely composed critique of Weimar society. Hoch's work is notable for its visible seams: she did not try to hide the fact that her images were assembled from fragments. The visible cuts and pastes are part of the meaning, signaling that the image is a construction, not a representation of reality.
El Lissitzky (1890-1941)
Lissitzky's photomontages combined Constructivist geometry with photographic fragments. His The Constructor (1924) is a self-portrait in which his hand, holding a compass, overlaps with his face, and geometric elements float in the space around him. The image is simultaneously a portrait, a diagram, and a manifesto for the artist as engineer. Lissitzky's work in Constructivism connected photomontage to the broader project of reimagining art as a tool for social transformation.
Gustav Klutsis (1895-1938)
Klutsis is considered the father of Soviet photomontage. His works, produced for propaganda posters, book covers, and magazine illustrations, combined photographic fragments with geometric typography and Constructivist design. His Dynamic City (1919-1920) and his Lenin-era propaganda posters used photomontage to create images of revolutionary energy and industrial progress. Klutsis was arrested and executed under Stalin's orders in 1938, a reminder that the artists who built the visual language of Soviet propaganda were not immune to the regime they served.
Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956)
Rodchenko used photomontage in book design, posters, and magazine covers. His covers for the journal USSR in Construction, produced in the 1930s, combined aerial photographs, close-ups, and geometric layouts to create dynamic compositions that presented Soviet industry as a visual spectacle. Rodchenko's photomontages, like his straight photographs, used unusual angles and extreme perspectives to defamiliarize everyday subjects.
Photomontage is closely related to collage, the broader technique of assembling fragments into a new whole, which emerged in the same period through Cubism and Dada. It connects to Constructivism, the Russian movement that produced the most politically significant photomontages. It relates to Dadaism, where the technique was invented as an anti-art strategy. It overlaps with composite photography, a related but distinct practice. The political uses of photomontage connect it to propaganda posters. For broader context, read our post on photography as fine art, or explore our entry on digital photography.
See Photomontage in Person
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds historical photo collages and photomontages in its photography collection. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds works by Hannah Hoch, El Lissitzky, and Alexander Rodchenko. The Estorick Collection in London mounted Cut and Paste: European Photomontage 1920-1945, which provided a rediscovery of the sources of modern image making. The Berlin exhibition Metamorphosis at Chaussee 36 (2025) marked the centenary of Hajek-Halke's first photomontages.
If you want to trace the history, start with the Victorian trick photographs at the Rijksmuseum, then move to the Dada photomontages of Hoch and Heartfield at MoMA, and end with the Soviet Constructivist works of Lissitzky and Klutsis. You will see the same technique serving opposite purposes: entertainment, political critique, state propaganda, and artistic experimentation. For more, read our entries on collage and Constructivism, or explore our post on modern versus contemporary art.
