Task 1

Hannah HochHannah Hoch was a German artist/photographer, and became famous for her contemporary multimedia, collage/photomontage work. These works she created were usually to do with the way women are perceived in the media, how they are viewed and how they should look. She was also a part of the DADA movement, which lots of other artists which concentrated on anti-war politics and the rejection of art and anti-cultural works. Dada became the start for many different kinds of art, like performance art, abstract art and sound poetry. Because she created work and art that was ahead of her time, her art if considered contemporary, but the methods she used were traditional, as film cameras and found images were the only thing that had been invented back then. These images would be presented as art, in a show or exhibition or in a book.

Idris KhanIdris Khan is an artist who is deeply interested in layering of images, multi-exposure images. His work relies on the continuous layering of new layers of the same thing but in a slightly different angle or slightly more zoomed out. Originally Idris became famous for layering another photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher’s exposures of similar images that they had taken. The technique he is using is contemporary, as it is new and no one has seen it been done before. But the method of how the photographs have been taken is traditional methods, as they are older photos from different photographers, these have been taken on film, so Idris Khan has layered the multiple exposures with the film from the camera, rather than digitally. His work is originally art, to be shown in galleries and books, but one of his pieces actually became commercial, when it was used for album artwork for a band.

Man RayMan Ray was an experimental, modernist artist who came up with the idea of taking pictures using rayographs, taking photos without the use of a camera. Along with Hannah Hoch he was also a part of the DADA movement. He was an artist and worked with different mediums, and considered himself a painter, but he was most well known for his photography. He was a famous for his portrait and fashion photography. Man Ray worked with photograms, which he then owned, and called his pieces ‘Rayographs’ in reference to himself. Man Ray’s work was seen to be contemporary because he was experimenting with different kinds of techniques and subject matters. But the methods he used were traditional, because artists in those days could only work with film and their own hands, digital products had not been invented back then in the early 1900s. His work would be considered as fine art, and would be displayed in exhibitions or in books.