Because photomontage is based on the structural
principle of pictorial rupture and re-assembly, the medium is understood in
scholarly literature as the symbolic register of the shocks and disjunctures of
modern life. Yet, I point out that most of the photomontages that John
Heartfield manufactured for the communist journal Die Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (AIZ) insistently suppress the seams and ruptures of their
manufacture, instead offering up pictorially-sutured photomontages that
propagate fictions of visual wholeness rather than of cognitive ruptures. They
do so, I argue, in order to issue an ideological critique from a leftist
perspective, staging our illusory, unstable apprehension of the world. Characterized
by a continuity of surface, these photomontages are bound into (and thus
integral to) a mass-circulation journal, in critical dialogue with the
photo-reportages that preceded and followed them¿occasionally in content, but
primarily though imitation of their matter, their medium, their form. Heartfield's
AIZ works offer a radical Left
critique of the mass-circulated photograph and its production of political
consciousness by internalizing and miming its very means through photomontage. Leftist
critique in John Heartfield's montages, I maintain, resides in suture. In using the term 'suture' to discuss
Heartfield's work, I incorporate its cinematic connotations, in their most
basic sense, into my analysis, considering how his photomontages summon their
beholder both optically and psychologically. We have not entirely grasped the
metaphoric operations of photomontage until we have understood the role of
pictorial suture, and the deliberate suppression of rupture, in John
Heartfield's project.