Photography By Hermin Abramovitch

It was during this time period that Dada sprung to life. Dada artists Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann were pioneers of an experimental photographic technique which came to be known as photomontage. Photomontage is a process that involves making an image from the combination and composition of different photographs. It differs from the process of collage in that the material used for composition is primarily, if not exclusively, photographs. The works created by Höch and Hausmann, as well as other Dada artists such as George Grosz and John Heartfield, acted as visual representations of their environment. The way the images were composed, sometimes seemingly haphazardly, reflected the quick changes to life felt during the period after World War I.
Another Dada artist who made an impact on traditional photography was Christian Schad. He developed a photographic printing technique that was a "reinvention" of a process developed by William Henry Fox Talbot. Tristan Tzara called Schad's work "schadography," for various speculated reasons, including the term being a reference to both Schad's name and the German word "schaden," which means "damaged." "Damaged" is an appropriate adjective to describe Schad's work, as he used scraps of paper and various other little bits of trash to create his compositions. Schad would arrange his findings on a piece of sensitized paper, put a plate of glass over them to keep them in place, and expose the whole thing to light, sometimes adjusting elements in the composition during the exposure process.