Corbeau & Renard, La trajectoire du regard, 2006, p. 65
Catalogue Essay
“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 fulfil this challenge, this need for documentary truth. The mechanical complexity of the external forms of objects and of our industrial culture forces the artist concerned with production – the Constructivist artist – to move from his imperfect methods of drawing a subject to the application of photography. And so photomontage was born. Photomontage – the assemblage and combination of expressive elements from individual photographs. In our country the first photomontages were created by the Constructivist A.M. Rodchenko in 1922 as illustrations to I.” Varvara Stepanova “Photomontage”, 1928.