Photomontage as practice of resistance and gender politics. Hannah Höch and Claude Cahun

Abstract

Starting from the second half of the nineteenth century, some women have experimented an alternative artistry with the aim of refusing to identify with the image of submission, exclusion and marginality that politics, culture and society designed for them. By alternative artistry we mean here to refer to self-representation practices that tradition associated with amateur creativity, such as family album photography and diary writing. Just as diary writing has generally been associated with the world of women, so in art women have often been attracted to autobiographical and self-reflective experiences. And precisely for this reason, that is to be close to the psychological and existential needs of women, the diary and the autobiographical photography (such as the self-portrait but not only), have been considered by scholars, until not so long ago, expressions of a marginal creativity. This essay aims to enhance the great political and resistance force that, thanks to the union of these two dimensions, women (both in private and authorial practices) have expressed through the photographic diary, the album, the scrapbook, or in any case through a material object, an overall autonomous project made by combining photographs, words, drawings. Starting from a particular practice, the photo collage albums that Lady Filmer (and other Victorian women) made in the second half of the nineteenth century, the essay focuses on the analysis of the early twentieth century works of two artists engaged in activities of resistance and difference: Scrapbook by Hannah Höch and Aveux non avenus by Claude Cahun.