Hannah Höch

Hannah Höch was a German artist of the Dada movement, she was one of the pioneers of photo montage. Her work is easily recognised by the sepia tones that reflect the epoch in which she lived, and the cut and paste style of the subjects in her final image.

Personal response to Hannah Höch

The above is my personal response in the style of Dada artist Hannah Höch, the main theme to my image is the conflict between the natural and unnatural world.

I began by finding the objects I would use, most of the photos I took myself however the cranberries and the large machine as stock images off the Internet. Then, to reflect the cut and paste style of Hannah Höch, I printed the images from my computer, cut out the object, and retook a photo of the cut-out. This gave the pictures a grainy effect and made them much easier to separate from the background.

To make my the background for my final image I filled the background layer with two shades of brown, fading from light brown on the left to dark brown on the light. I made a new layer filled with a cracked paint texture and set this to soft light.

Next I imported all the photos of my objects and arranged them accordingly, for the hand holding the translucent clock I made two seperate layers; one with the clock face the other with the hand. I lowered the transparency of the top layer and set it to multiply (top layer being the clock face), then using the magic wand tool I selected the background around the hand and inverted it. I then changed the mode of the lasso tool to 'subtract from selection' and selected so that only thumb is left.