Moscow — Berlin: The Photomontage in Illustrated Magazines of the 1920s

Abstract

This paper presents the historical experience of organizing the visual space of an illustrated magazine and its artistic design by means of photography. Attention is focused on the application of photomontage in the demonstrated samples of printed publications of the Soviet Union and Weimar Germany in the 1920s. Special attention is paid to the features of the artistic appearance of the Soviet illustrated magazine “Smena” (Moscow), which began publishing in 1924, and the German workers’ illustrated newspaper “Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung” (Berlin), which published photographic materials since 1925. These publications became a symbol of the use of photomontage in the first post-revolutionary decade in the world illustrated periodicals. In the years of the avant-garde, photomontage became a method of forming an artistic composition through the efforts of the Berlin Dada and Soviet constructivists. And in propaganda works it becomes a method of constructing a fact that convinces and motivates the reader. The replacement of illustration by photography and photomontage was accelerated in illustrated magazines. This happened especially vividly in the 1920s, when new artistic techniques for creating imagery. The result of the study is the revealed specificity of the use of photomontage within the framework of two paradigms: Dadaism and constructivism, and their influence on the artistic appearance of Soviet and German illustrated magazines of the 1920s. The predominance of mainly constructivist ideas is shown both in the magazine “Smena” and in “Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung”, despite the German roots of avant-garde photomontage. The result of the comparative analysis was the thesis about the initial influence of Moscow on Berlin within the framework of the visual strategy of propaganda periodicals. At the end of the decade under review, this vector began to change its orientation, and already Soviet illustrated magazines were looking at the work of German colleagues in terms of photomontage developments. And here the undisputed leadership in visual innovations belonged to “Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung”.