Representing the Past in Photomontage: John Heartfield as a Visual Historian

The practice of history and the technique of montage seem to have met at some point of their development to forge a new way of thinking about the past. This new paradigm crystallized around the period between the First and the Second World War, when the proliferation of montage techniques in visual arts and film was accompanied by a broad theoretical discussion on the relevance of the new procedure in arranging and organizing photographic ‘facts’.