Messing with Montage

Hannah Höch is a German born Dada artist whose photo montage is some of the best I’ve seen. I reflected on being a woman in the 1920’s and her amazing work. I found a quote from Hugo Ball saying ‘For us, art is not an end itself...but and opportunity for the true perception and criticism of the times we live in’. I liked that. However while reading about Hannah and the Dadaist I found it annoying that such free thinkers still expected Hannah to make the refreshments at their meetings. Hans Richter described Hoch’s contribution to the Dada movement as the “sandwiches, beer and coffee she managed somehow to conjure up despite the shortage of money.”

Hannah’s work commonly combine’s male and female traits into one unified being. During this era "mannish women were both celebrated and castigated for breaking down traditional gender roles." Her androgynous characters may also have been related to her bisexuality and attraction to women. Many of her pieces challenge mass culture within the beauty industry, at the time gaining significant momentum in mass media through the rise of fashion and advertising photography. Many of her political works from the Dada period supported women's liberation with social and political revolution. Her works from 1926 to 1935 often depicted same sex couples, and women were once again a central theme in her work from 1963 to 1973. Höch also made strong statements on racial discrimination and the war.

Below are some of my experiment’s inspired by Höch. I got a bit carried away playing with these paper German dolls! I had a go at my own bit of photo montage and I got a book called The Age of Collage: Contemporary Collage in Modern Age by Silke Krohn. I think Hannah would have loved this book!

 This is my first real attempt at a montage. I really found the process cathartic.

Worth it's weight...

I don't really have a favorite colour but I do find gold very eye catching. It works really well as an accent colour to draw the eye. It does work well in a printed form as a point of interest on book covers. Here are a couple of my gold experiments. I used gold leaf, plastacine and Gill sans letterpress characters.

What is Pylongraphy?

As human being’s, we are hard wired to see familiar objects and shapes quickly. Anyone who has looked at the clouds and spotted two eyes, a nose and a mouth have felt the influence of Pareidolia! Paredolia is “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist”.

There are some interesting examples of this on the web, you can find photograph’s from people around the world who see faces in very unlikely places. There are images of Hilter’s face in a building, Mother Teresa as a Bagle and Mother Mary in a slice of cheesy toast. There are lots of funny digitally altered ones too.

Some scholars say its our evolutionary inclination for survival, to recognise familiar shapes quickly so we can respond to threatening situations more effectively and survive longer. Some say that our brains are constantly sifting through random lines, shapes, surfaces and colours. It makes sense of these images by assigning meaning to them - usually by matching them to something stored in long-term knowledge. Whatever the scientific reason may be - experiencing Pareidolia, is really quite cool.

Whilst researching this subject and seeing many examples of faces in the food stuffs and stains of the world, I began to wonder... If we can experience Pareidolia for faces or familiar shapes why can’t we experience the same thing for words? Could we not experience a typographic Pareidolia? So what is Pylongraphy? It’s nothing... I just made it up. However, I have been fascinated with Transmission Towers for a while. They are so very obvious and so invisible at the same time. I like to stand and look up and see what shapes I can see in their crisscross fret work. There are so many horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines that its impossible not to make geometric shapes whilst you stand under their tall outstretched wings. I photographed them and saw that I could make a whole nexus alphabet. The type has a very angular and irregular characteristic and the beauty is that there are many alternatives and options in what the letter’s can look like.

Pylongraphy may well be made up but so is the random cheese face that looks like Mother Mary. The reality is born when we give these things meaning. The lady who found cheesy Mother Mary now prints it on T-shirts. I look at Pylons and make typography. Our brains work in such an imaginary way and it would be interesting to see how many of our existing typographic beginnings have been born from “the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist”. In the same way that a religious person may see a heavenly sign in a random smear on the underside of a marmite lid, so we, as designers, receive inspiration from the world around us and make things real.

Let us not inhibit our brains natural pathways in seeing things that are not really there. Let reason and logic be still, as we allow our minds to wonder the horizons of nonexistence.

Transmission Tower
Giant angels of steel across my landscape
Reaching the upper bounds of my horizon
Thin metal structures of perfect lattice
Electrified ribbons extending for miles
A nexus plexus of transmission power