At the cutting edge of Australian photography
"I cut out bits of pictures from magazines, put them beside each other and push them around a bit. Whoever said that the pen is mightier than the sword forgot the scissors"
Peter Lyssiotis[1]
To my knowledge, Peter Lyssiotis is the only photographic artist in Australia who practises photomontage. The term 'photomontage' was coined in the years following World War One by the Berlin Dadaists, who used the photograph as ready-made image alongside cuttings from newspapers and magazines, lettering and drawings to form a chaotic, explosive image-a provocative dismembering of reality.[2] But the practice has become associated primarily with the anti-Nazi photomontages of the German Communist, John Heartfield. In the 1970s, some radical activists in Australia produced posters with a clear debt to Heartfield's polemical photomontages.
Like him, they used found photographs and bold printed words to demonise the patriarchs in power and promote resistance. But in general local practitioners of photography have pursued a Griersonian aesthetic- the creative recording of actuality, the real live scene or event, even when that actuality is staged. It is widely believed that a photographic artist, or creative photographer, is one who produces an image from scratch. One can 'doctor' the image, but it is an image that one has shot, if not printed, oneself. The photographer uses the camera to make art just as the painter uses the brush, the writer the pen ...
In this context, Peter Lyssiotis 's work stands out as aberrant. He remains addicted to the practice of photomontage. Like Heartfield, he uses second-hand, found images and adds verbal text. Unlike Heartfield, who derived his images mainly (but not exclusively) from photojournalism, Lyssiotis uses images from advertising... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline