Hannah Hoch

Dada Ernst - 1920

 This montage is clearly questioning the role of women in society during the 1920's, I came to this conclusion due to then pair of legs with the coins (money)
The older painting like women playing the trumped adds a feeling of a more traditional feminine view of females which contrasts with the main focal legs - wearing sexually provocative lingerie. The female appearances are all in contrast with one another, the female athlete at the bottom of the image almost feels at though she is being watched over by the other cut out of the male athlete which raises many questions regarding sexuality and the roles of women.

Beautiful Girl - 1920

This photomontage is particularly useful to reflect upon in relation to this assignment as to me the image speaks of new technologies and the hopes for women which came along with the new technological  developments.

German Girl - 1930

To me this image speaks about identity and appearance, i get the sense that Hoch was challenging the ideals surrounding defined beauty. The female is distorted and in general the image has a feeling of mocking what is considered normal. With these, as with other photomontage i am always encouraged to consider the scale of the objects in order to discover the importance of each segment, in addition the shift in scale along with careful positioning and layering increases the symbolism associated with them. These are things i always tend to take into consideration when trying to unpick the underlying message. Very often with photomontage i find there is a social/political message embedded which makes them all the more interesting to view. Liz wells book has a section titles "The body as machine" in which Hannah Hoch's montage's are included. "the photomontages if the Dada artist Hanna Hoch celebrate the 'new woman', playfully juxtaposing magazine images of women with photographs of machine parts, but also seem critical of the uniform, idealised and machine-like mannequins depicted in same magazines. " (Page 197) "The camera is one of the number of machines (including telephones and computers) which appear to be like prosthetics in the way that we treat them as extensions of our own bodies but which change the ways we physically engage with the world. The ver presence of the camera transforms the scene, it intervenes in reality. The camera threatens to take over and replace the eye: it gets between the viewer and the viewed and 'shoes real it according to it's terms'." (Wells, 2009: 194) "I;m an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only i can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility.... My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus i explain in a new way the world unknown to you." (Vertov, 1923 cited in Wells, 2009: 192)