I think that the idea of working with montages to create something meaningful is fascinating. I think that a piece of work outlined in the readings/presentation that spoke to me the most is all of the work done by John Heartfield (Anti-Nazi Propaganda/art). I think this sticks out to me the most because of how simple yet powerful it is, for example the piece on slide 26 with the person’s head being enveloped by newspaper makes me think of how the German population was so consumed by the Nazi propaganda at the time and how they couldn’t really believe anything else. I think that the readings made me think of how insanely powerful photoshop actually is and how lazy that piece of software has made digital artists. A montage piece used to take potentially days of cutting and gluing/taping in order to make a finished product and now someone can just boot up photoshop or some comparable program and finish it in a couple hours. I think its convenient to have and I’m personally glad I have it because I wouldn’t want to be cutting/gluing for days on end, but I think it could be fun to give that kind of thing a try at least once just to see how awful it is to not have photoshop. As I mentioned above I think that my project is going to be inspired by the work of John Heartfield, more specifically I think I’m going to focus on the similarities between 1940’s Nazi Germany and current day America because MAN is there a LOT of scary similarities. I would like to try to imitate, specifically, the piece I mentioned above with the newspaper covering the individuals face but instead use a phone/television and having it be enveloping their face in the same way. Additionally I want to try to make the Hitler one but use our current president’s face/body instead.
