be described as a method of setting up for altera-
tions that are to be made in printing when deter-
mining the exposure. In other words, the
photographer plans for an outcome by deep
immersion in the technical realities of the black-
and-white photographic process at the expense of
adhering to a more organic and subjective sense of
the creative process, which had long characterized
the fine arts in general.
Altering images helped establish photography in
art throughout the 1930s and 1960s. In the 1930s,
artists like Man Ray introduced solarization as a
method of darkroom alteration to create one-of-a-
kind images, especially in a number of his portraits
of painters, sculptors, and writers of the Surrealist
movement. Methods of altering photographs and
thus the results of this manipulation changed com-
pletely in the 1960s: whether Pop artists like Richard
Hamilton, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol
utilized photographs by means of silk screen prints,
or whether painters like Jasper Johns, Gerhard Rich-
ter, Sigmar Polke, and others began to paint after
photographic images in free stylistic interpretations,
whether other painters like Richard Estes, Malcolm
Morley, or Franz Gertsch projected slides onto
screens to paint the results by airbrush and other
techniques, all started with a photograph or a photo-
graphic reproduction and altered it by changing its
medium of appearance.
The third method of practising VR in photogra-
phy is photomontage. The word was first used to
describe the practice of cutting out photographic
fragments and re-arranging them on a given or
drawn surface, as in the work of John Heartfield,
El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Mieczeslaw Berman,
and a number of others who were not only active in
applying this method to art but to political expres-
sion as well. Another form of photomontage has
created the paradigmata for VR. That is the melt-
ing of images into each other, often named by its
mannernegative montage.It was practiced in the
preliminary courses of photography at nearly any
art school of the 1920s.
The collage of photographic and graphic frag-
ments had been a common practice with the Dadaists
and Surrealists of the 1920s, especially in the work of
Hannah Ho ̈ch and Raoul Hausmann, and painters
Max Ernst, Salvador Dalı ́,andRene ́Magritte. The
negative montage—under Man Ray’s influence—
came into wide use in the 1930s among these artists.
Pablo Picasso mixed the nineteenth century practice
of thecliche ́verre(creating an image on glass that is
then used like a photographic negative) with the
montage of images and texts into pictures, and his
friend Dora Maar worked on a series of photomon-
tages with melted columns, deep tunnels, and hard to
discern elements that create an overall feeling of fear.
An interesting development was taken by the Czech
Surrealist movement with Karel Teige, Jindrˇich
Sˇtyrsky ́, and others. They began to melt all three
elements of VR by staging small table-top arrange-
ments that were used in combination with texts and
collages or combined by printing.
With the strong influence of the 1930s, Surrealism
on American advertising, staged realities found their
way into everyday life. Lejaren Hiller and Edward
Steichen composed pictures from large groups of
people by both staging them and mounting smaller
groups into one larger image. The American influence
quickly returned to Europe and even determined
advertising in the Third Reich: Herbert Bayer’s
work for the (Germanized) Dorland agency included
mixtures of table-top phoography, drawings, typo-
graphic elements, and all sorts of grids. The same
can be said about modern advertising in Italy as can
be seen in the work of Xanti Schawinsky, or in Swit-
zerland in the work of Herbert Matter or Josef Mu ̈l-
ler-Brockmann. All of these works created spaces that
obviously did not exist, and they played with the
perspective—large faces or objects in the foreground,
no middle ground in the image, and a prominent
background for presenting the written message.
These stagings and montages often resulted in
posters and magazine ads, which were extremely
popular and well accepted by the public. Thus one
consequence was that similar forms of VR were used
for military propaganda during World War II. The
zenith of VR in photography was reached, however,
in the 1950s, mainly in advertising and fashion
photography. The Americans Richard Avedon and
Irving Penn and the Britons Cecil Beaton and Angus
McBean decorated their elegant models and beauti-
ful women with VR, mostly by combining elaborated
constructed sets and montage techniques. And VR
returned to fine art photography in the 1950s and
1960s in the form of combination printing, as seen in
the German fotoform group as well as in Japanese
photography, as in the work of Shoji Ueda or Ei-Q.
French photographers like Daniel Masclet did not
follow the call for abstraction and set about creating
spaces that were conceivable but not real. Similar
impulses were followed by Americans like Wynn
Bullock, Clarence John Laughlin, and Minor White.
The influence of Bullock, Laughlin, and White
formed a movement in the 1960s closely related to
VR, the vision of private realities as a successful
exhibition named it in 1974. Chief among the propo-
nents of this type of expression are Jerry Uelsmann
and Ralph Meatyard, who were later followed by
Linda Connor, Ralph Gibson, Les Krims, DuaneVIRTUAL REALITY