... The name was chosen with rare unanimity by the Berlin Dadaists, although they were later to dispute its exact historical origins within their own group. "Seized with an innovarory zeal," Raoul Hausmann wrote, "I also needed a name for this technique, and in agreement with George Grosz, John Heartfield, Johannes Baader, and Hannah Höch, we decided to call this works photomontages. This term translates our aversion at playing the artist, and, thinking of ourselfs as engineers (hence our preference for workmens´s overalls) we meant to construct, to assemble (montieren) our works." Montage in German means "fitting" or "assembly line", and Monteur "mechanic", "engineer". John Heartfield, perhaps the best-known practitioner of photomontage, was known as the Monteur Heartfield by the Dadaists, not simply because of his photomontages, but in recognition of an attitude, which they all shared, towards their work and its relation to existing artistic hierachies. The Berlin Dadaists used the photograph as a ready-made image, pating it together with cuttings from newspapers and magazines, lettering and drawing to form chaotic, explosive image, a provosative dismembering of reality. From being one element among several, the photograph became dominant in Dada pictures, for which it was peculiarly effective and appropriate material. Its use was part of Dadaists´reaction against oil painting, which is essentially unrepeatable, ptivate and exclusive. Photomontage belonged to the technological world, the world of mass communication and photo-mechanical reproduction. When Hannah Höch said of photomontage: "Our whole purpose was to integrate objects from the world of machines and industry in the world of art", I think she meant it in the sense that the materials of photomontage, particularly newspaper photographs and newsprint, were made by mechanical processes, as well as in the iconographical sense.
from: DAWN ADES - PHOTOMONTAGE, Thames & Hudson, 1976
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