“Fragment and Fantasy: Photomontage as a Practice of Liberation”

Since its revolutionary origins in the Dada and Constructivist movements, photomontage has been associated with political dissent, the subversion of reality, and the visualization of fantastical alternatives. Given photography’s purported “realism,” the recombinatory possibilities of photomontage have been especially useful when creative freedom, cultural production, and democratic values are under assault. Indeed, subversive and feminist perspectives by avant-garde artists like Hannah Höch and John Heartfield still resonate powerfully. This panel asks: When the present is bleak, how can photomontage continue to serve as a tool for imaging speculative and liberatory visions?

While photography historians Andrés Zervigón and Sabine Kriebel have questioned the utility of the technique, asking “Is Photomontage Over?,” we read their question as an invitation as much as a provocation. Contemporary artists working with photography, like Giana De Dier and Joiri Minaya, are finding in photomontage and collage opportunities for historical redress— remediating archival absences, challenging gendered and racial stereotypes, and imagining utopian scenarios. Meanwhile, contemporary scholars are revisiting photomontages from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, proposing novel interpretations. We invite contributions that frame photomontage (and its peers, photo-collage, combination printing, and photographic assemblage) as techniques for emancipatory worldmaking and resistance. We especially welcome proposals that consider global perspectives and/or center artists from marginalized communities, including women, BIPOC, queer, and migrant individuals. By exploring how artists have strategically employed photomontage to take apart and reassemble the world around them, this panel reconceives photographic “reality” in favor of the fantastical, the liberatory, the humorous, the erotic, and the utopian.