What are the characteristics of john heartfield's photographic works?

JohnHeartfield (1891 ~ 1968), a German photographer, was a master of photography montage.

hatfield lost his father when he was a child, and lived a miserable life. Later, through hard work, he was admitted to Munich Art School at the age of 16, and continued to receive art education in Charrothenburg. Hatfield has worked as an advertising painter, an art teacher, a cover designer and a stage art designer, and has made great achievements in painting, sculpture and art design, but it is the photography montage that makes him truly famous.

photo montage is photo editing. As a kind of photography technique, it was popular in the 192s and 193s, and was widely used in artistic expression, publishing design and advertising production.

hatfield's real name, Helser Helmut, was changed to an English name like john heartfield to show his contempt for the German Empire. In World War I, hatfield, who served in the German Army, made postcards with his friends by collage to communicate with each other in order to avoid the wartime postal inspection. This is the predecessor of photographic montage.

hatfield regards photographic montage as the most handy combat weapon. He is good at turning photography into a social and political weapon and injecting obvious political motives into surreal photos. His works have a clear theme and are full of fighting power. His main purpose is to oppose the war of aggression and death and Nazi fascism.

the 193s was an important period for hatfield's creation. From 193 to 1938, he produced 237 photographic montages for Laborer Pictorial, the organ newspaper of the German production party. He edited photos and newspapers, created posters and magazine illustrations for anti-Nazi, and satirized Adolf Hitler by all means. For example, in his most influential work "Superman Adolf Swallows Gold and Spits Shit", the so-called "Superman" Hitler swallowed a lot of gold coins and stuffed the whole chest. There is a caption beside the photo:

He swallowed gold and spit out garbage.

This photo fully exposes Hitler's hypocrisy and greed with clever editing techniques, and it is said that Hitler himself was very annoyed.

In addition, in "The Meaning of Hitler Salute", hatfield vividly exposed an "unspoken" fact through a photo montage: Hitler was a puppet manipulated by the German big bourgeoisie with money. And "Wow, there is no butter" is a satire on Goering's famous saying that "iron always makes the country strong, while butter and lard can only make people fat". In this work, not only the adults at the dining table are munching on steel to satisfy their hunger, but also the baby in the stroller and the dog on the ground are munching on steel with relish.

These works seem absurd, but they vividly depict the nature of Nazi fascism. Therefore, hatfield was madly persecuted by the Nazis, his works were burned, his nationality was revoked, and he was forced into exile in the Czech Republic. Taking photos as a political weapon and exerting such great power is unique in the history of photography.