In the twentieth century, due to the development of mechanical reproduction and press, photomontage became a popular means of communication – popular and diverse in its nature and methods of exploitation. It is one of the cultural phenomena related to the change of rhythm of life and a sense of its increased pace, and an impression of fragmentation of reality. This article questions the role of photomontage in such an experience. The said role is complex: sometimes photomontage allows for expression (...) of that experience, and sometimes it is meant to evoke it, in the spirit of modernity; it is both a tool of agitation and critique. In order to answer this question I shall assume the approach of Walter Benjamin, who diagnoses the crisis of experience and the loss of storytelling skills – and describes the potential of photography. This potential is differently approached by artists and scholars who point out contradictory purposes and results of using photomontage. Referring to various works of art shall make it possible to define the tensions characteristic of photomontage. Due to its plasticity and the ambiguity of a photograph, and the potential for contextualization and construction, photomontage can function in a hard to understand, rapidly changing world and address the fragmentation of experience. (shrink)

Didi-Huberman treats the montage of images as a reconstructive, critical and consequently political tool. It involves disassembling and assembling fragments in different constellations in search of contrasts, relationships and new meanings. The montage is both a way to create sequences and narratives and a tool to break an image of reality and a discourse. In his book Images malgré tout, the author struggles with the impotence of imagination and the illegibility of images, which, however, are testimony to the demanding efforts (...) of confrontation and imagination. They represent an important and controversial subject of the politics of memory. The analysis of Bertolt Brecht’s diaries shows a second – critical and deconstructive – aspect of montage. Photographs and texts compiled by Brecht in Arbeitsjournal and Kriegsfibel undermine their previous significance, causing shock and forcing viewers to adapt their attitudes towards them.Images acquire meaning and expression along with other images and texts; they require knowledge and imagination, otherwise they are just incomprehensible views. They do not represent a final, whole and individual truth. They stimulate thinking and imagining; they can allow us to build a narrative, understand an event, distance ourselves from the surrounding, feel a sense of strangeness and alienation, and at the same time – through provocation – produce a critical engagement. The montage of images does not allow us, however, to adopt a position from which we can settle things. Its political value involves destabilization of the existing discourse, revealing cracks and a troubling picture of reality. It is a moment of orientation through the confrontation of different elements of a perspective taken. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur uncovered the creative aspect of language in his theory of metaphor. The metaphor is a special combination of words that as a clash of distant semantic fields forces the reader to interpret the sentence in a new way and see things in a new light. It is a process in which the imagination plays an important role. Ricoeur compares the metaphor to the Kantian schema which is a procedure to provide an image to a concept. The image helps (...) in the process of assimilating distant elements and thus to achieve a new interpretation. To change perspective the suspension of reference is also needed. The aim of this essay is to analyze the imaginative functions which are operative in the metaphor and look for an answer to the question about the role of the imagination as a productive power as well as a power of internal intuitions. (shrink)