The use of photography as a means of entertainment or play certainly goes back to the middle decades of the 19th century, and ranged from the elaborate collages made by Lady Filmer and her well-to-do friends to the stereoscopic craze in all its manifestations. However, photographic amusements in a narrower sense were closely associated with the amateur photography movement in full swing by the 1890s. Composite images, extreme high- and low-angle shots, and the deliberate use of optical distortions were its principal tools, used by photographers to caricature their friends and perhaps to lampoon current fads; Jacques-Henri Lartigue, for example, was one of many enthusiasts who created spoof ‘spirit’ images with double exposures. The numerous articles and dozen or so books on the subject published in Europe and the USA between 1890 and 1910 attest to the popularity of this kind of image making. But it was the rise of the fantasy postcard at the beginning of the 20th century that really gave it mass appeal. A few years later, it was the turn of members of avant-garde movements— Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, New Vision—to adopt these techniques. Particularly celebrated was the combination by the one-time Futurist Wanda Wulz of her own features with those of her cat (1932). Some artists, like Hannah Hoech or Paul Éluard (1895-1952), actually collected fantasy cards. Others, like László Moholy-Nagy, freely acknowledged the influence of photographic amusements on their artistic experiments. Yet their aims were different. Even if the desire to create caricatures was common to both amateurs and artists, its target had changed. Whereas the former had simply made fun of their subjects, the latter set out to challenge the medium itself, by calling in question its most basic rules. Their aim was not distortion but transformation.
— Clément Chéroux
Bibliography
- Woodbury, W. E., Photographic Amusements (1896).
- Smith, E., All the Photo-Tricks (1940)
