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"Another history of photography. As an aesthetic design principle, photomontage is today mostly associated with the schools and styles of avant-garde modernism: Dadaism, Constructivism, Cubism, Futurism or Surrealism.
In the 1910s and 1920s, the montage was virtually omnipresent in European art, literature, advertising and political propaganda.
Immediately after the 'birth' of photography in 1839, the full range of technical and aesthetic possibilities of the new medium was explored.
By evaluating early assembly pictures, this book overcomes the classic picture concept of the simple single picture.
The scientist duo Bernd Stiegler (modern German literary studies, University of Konstanz) and Felix Thürlemann (art history, University of Konstanz), for the first time, give a comprehensive reminder that the montage already existed before Raoul HAUSMANN, George GROSZ, John HEARTFIELD, Johannes BAADER and Hannah HÖCH, yes as old as the technology of photography itself.
In an opulent book with a well-understood history of art and impressive illustrations, the authors present the history of photographic montage in the 19th century using their semantics. They enhance the pioneering work of technicians and artists such as William Henry FOX TALBOT, Louis-Jacques-Mandé DAGUERRE or Johann Carl ENSLEN and conclude with a detailed classification of the most important forms of premodern assembly: object assembly, negative assembly, positive assembly, optical assembly and tableau arrangement .
Stiegler and Thürlemann show, for example, how the collage was used creatively in organized crime, self-portrayal or parapsychology in the nineteenth century - parallel to the art-theoretical discourses on realism, naturalism and realism.
The authors create an opulent and surprising picture book that presents different models of the construction of reality, realism and reality in photography.
Numerous examples represent the entire spectrum of photomontage in the 19th century; some of them are published for the first time in this book. The authors are thus opening a new chapter in the history of photography." (publisher's text, © Schwabe Verlag, 2019)