John Heartfield Essay

John Heartfield, born Helmut Herzfeld, founder of the German DADA group, was a leading pioneer of the photomontage which he used primarily to raise public consciousness and promote social change. According to Heartfield, his work simply disclosed the “truth” obscured by the mainstream press and by the propaganda of his political opponents. In pursuing this goal of unveiling, he often concentrated his efforts on photographs that had appeared in the illustrated press and has thus already played a role in shaping public perception. Heartfield essentially placed him before Germany’s visual culture like a prosecutor with scissors, doggedly slicing through images that asserted a reality he judged to be false. Appearing in magazine spreads, campaign posters, and book covers, his rebellious visions sought to reshape public perception by challenging the photographs that helped form it. John Heartfield is an important figure in the history of design because his political photomontages has transformed …show more content…
A photomonteur was a person who disassociated a photograph from its original context and, with the aid of collage, alter the photograph in such a way until the desired message or truth was made clear. In fact, Heartfield’s was known to frequently say that, “you can really lie to people with photos, really lie to them.” Author of big ass book has stated that, “having been abandoned by his parents and raised by a series of overwhelmed caregivers, the young helmut Herzfeld consciously developed what his brother Wieland later called a ‘productive rage’. Young Heartfield learned from an early age how to channel his famous short temper into carefully staged performances that took the form of rebellious acts.” Helmut’s change of name to John Heartfield, which took place during World War I as a protest against the German military, is an example of his defiant nature that would later on appear in striking visual form in his