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Photomontage

Art
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

An image created by combining photographs or photographic fragments. In poetry, it can model juxtaposition, documentary collage, and disrupted narrative.

Detailed Definition
Photomontage assembles separate photographs into a single composition, often producing surprising, political, or dreamlike relationships among images. It became especially important in twentieth-century avant-garde and activist art. Poets can use photomontage principles by arranging documentary fragments, captions, visual descriptions, and discontinuous scenes without smoothing their contradictions. The resulting poem may expose the constructed nature of media images, memory, history, or public narratives.
Example
Example in poetry:
A photomontage poem can juxtapose newspaper headlines, family snapshots, advertising language, and overheard speech to imitate a collage of photographs; T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” uses abrupt shifts among voices and cultural fragments in a way that resembles photomontage; A poem about war could place a soldier’s letter beside a tourist postcard and a government slogan, allowing the contrast to create its argument; Claudia Rankine’s use of visual material and documentary fragments in “Citizen” demonstrates how image-based collage can deepen lyric testimony; A poet might arrange captions from old photographs beside imagined voices from the images, creating a layered photomontage of memory
Additional Notes
Photomontage offers a model for poems assembled from clippings, quotations, images, captions, or documentary fragments. Its abrupt joins can create irony or multiple meanings. Compare collage, montage, found poetry, and the fragmented narrative.
Also Known As
Photo Montage
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