Page 84 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 84/146
William Notman’s work concludes my brief overview survey of 19th century composite photo- graphy, scrap-books and albums - and of the ‘expansions’ of photography in that century. This is an important preliminary to be aware of before we begin to look at the tumult and radical upheaval in the arts in the early 20th century - really catalysed by painters and artists like Matisse, Mondri- an, Picasso and Braque - and later by photographers - especially those with pictorialist leanings. It was during the first decades of the new century (1900-1930) that modernist art practice impacted on Photography.
Decades before the modernist photomontage, invented by the Dadaists George Grosz, John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausmann and the Russians Gustav Klucis and Alexander Rod- chenko (and others) in the period 1916-1919, Hill & Adamson and Notman were successfully ex- ploiting photo-montage in otherwise formally conventional works.
Modernist Photomontage
So these Victorian scrapbook pages and the papier collés of Cubism were the immediate prede- cessors of the photomontage - an artform comprised of collaged photo-prints from posters, news- papers, magazines, packaging, wrappings, and other printed ephemera of the time.
Pablo Picasso: Papiers collés - Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass 1912 + Violin, Glass, Newspaper, Bottle 1913 + The Violin 1913.
The period 1908-1913, as John Berger has commented, was a very unusual period in Picasso’s de- velopment as an artist. “This was the only period in Picasso’s whole life, when his work to some ex- tent resembles that of other contemporary painters. It is also the one period of his life when his work (despite his own denial of this) reveals an absolutely consistent line of development: from Land- scape with a Bridge in 1908 to say, The Violin of 1913.” (John Berger: Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) p82).
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/12356/the-success-and-failure-of-picasso-by-john-berger/
This same period witnessed the invention and evolution of pictorial art into cubism, futurism, fauv- ism, and abstraction even conceptual art (Duchamp’s objet trouvé ), James Joyce was writing his Ulysses, using in part ‘stream of consciousness’ techiniques; Mondrian was creating his series of Tree paintings 1908-1912 leading to purely abstract paintings; Kandinsky was visualising his synaes- thesia in abstract painting; Matisse and the Fauves were reinventing colour in pictorialist paintings, Scriabin was composing multimedia work, synthesising coloured lights and music, the investigation of quantum theory had begun with Max Planck, the special theory of relativity published by Einstein, ballet was becoming avant garde, Alfred Jarry being celebrated; the first aeroplane flew; talk radio was invented, the ideas for television outlined in science literature; Gropius was designing his steel- frame, glass fenestrated factory; books on the future of Theatre and Dance were published, and as we have seen, vast photo-archives were being developed - and we had the movies too! this was a