The Invention of photography in the 19th century let the visual art go into a new path. The traditional premise of art, namely the realistic depiction of nature was abandoned and two different routes were open. One route led to the examination of the properties of pictorial elements, which resulted in the birth of abstract painting. The other route was that of Avant-Garde in which one finds and actively uses the possibility of new revolutionary artistic expressions from the inherent characteristics of photographs as a medium, with which photographs can be mass-copied and distributed. This research focuses on the latter and works especially on the photomontage by the Berliner Dadaist, John Heartfield, which was produced for mass-circulation magazines. For his work, Heartfield made use of media and techniques familiar to the masses to penetrate into their daily life and provoke their revolutionary leftist consciousness effectively. Such work was called ‘operative art,’ which was favored by leftist artists at that time. His work as such has been recognized as a successful case in which operative aesthetic, founded by a Russian leftist artist Sergj M. Tretjakov, is crystallized in visual art. The most representative ‘operative’ work by Heartfield is the photomontage for AIZ (Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung) in the 1930"s, which aimed to criticize the fascist ideology propagated by photography-based mass media. Heartfield took the photographs from fascist magazines and newspapers and combined them in a new way to deconstruct their original meanings. By doing so, Heartifled" photomontage for AIZ provides a successful example of the new art form with political efficacy in the age of mechanical reproduction, which Walter Benjamin accounts for in his theoretical work.
Heartfield used three artistic strategies, namely, suture, alienation and metamorphosis for his AIZ-Photomontage. His photomontage conceals the rupture and seams of the combined images and creates the illusion of visual wholeness. The first impression of wholeness created by suture is soon violated by the cognitive disjunction, which is caused by the alienation between images and between texts. By doing so his work offers a radical leftist critique of mass-circulated photographs and their conveyed political ideologies. As a result, appreciators realize a truth, namely the deceptiveness of the fascist ideology propagated by mass media. Sometimes, the operation of suture, the seamless transition of one thing to another, fuses with metamorphosis, the trope favored by surrealists for its destabilization of the signifier and the signified, to visualize the fatal consequences of the fascist ideology convincingly.