It was in 1910 that the German Dadaïsts Georg Grosz, John Heartfiled , , Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoöch have the first use of photomontage in reaction to the painting which he denounces the increasing abstraction. These photomontages are part of the will to protest and shock. This new art in 1920 is regarded as a major form of modern realism. Indeed photomontage reconciles imitation and composition.
That view dominates in the middle of Berlin Dadaist who opposes German Expressionism, which is a dominating power, reducing the figure of the artist to that of the image editor (Hausmann, Heartfield), close to the technician , against a devout vision of art and against sensible figure of the artist creator. Blend, off, poem, poster are all practices that put deconstructivist derided art and his claims. Heartfield evolve into a new kind of producer of art: the artist activist whose work is entirely driven by its function, its social purpose. At Hausmann one is in a playful space, in a consciousness that agrees to submit to the impulse visual imagination and automated. At John Heartfield, photomontage leads to a class. It articulates them pieces of a real outbreak, in order to make intelligible to that plunged into chaos in the world. It represents the removal from the point of view of the bourgeois class to the benefit of the proletariat. In the Soviet photomontage ( El Lissitzky , Alexander Rodtchenko ) is a space-perspectiviste and anti-naturalist, combining text and visual. It aims to have on the viewer the greatest possible action. The photomontage is tilted in its entirety by language: in Dadaist poem Hausmann, political slogan among Heartfield and the Soviets. At Hausmann the title does not change the meaning of the table but, as part of the collage, opens up a space to the subjectivity of each. At Heartfield slogan and it is injunction, which is extracted from speech, proverb or quote, as a piece of reality glued to the reality that piece of the picture. In Soviet there is a real sensitivity to the letters of alphabets and typography.

The collage was soon applied to photography through photomontage in the aesthetic of the fragment and shock. There are also attempting to cross painting, photography and drawing, photography and writing.

The collage is conceived as a means to penetrate the lines within a single image from reality (with Brecht: the image alone does not put enough emphasis on the World, only the introduction of extra photographic elements
The effectiveness of photomontage art is not limited by the photographic recording. The assembly is designed to make situations irreprésentables photographically. He is working to raise public awareness in the new social and political situations as well as the caricature. The gap and the detour artifice are facilitated by digital technology.
The digital photomontage operates a passage in the world of cut paper, glue and assembly manual to a World logical-mathematical that enables artists photomontage to tap into a set of images larger and accessible. The world of photomontage ignored the matter and move to a digital infinitely calculable. If the digital photography sees its documentary value compromised by the processing techniques and concealment much easier. The digital photomontage that was already in the pastiche, amalgam, the sensitive copes very well with digital.
But with the development of digital images are all, regardless of their source, something in common. Un air de famille, which is difficult to describe but helps unify the area and to provide air kinship to all images passing through the computer. This style digital is quite present in the photomontage advertising.
But photomontage remains for the artists a way to offer condensed and simultaneous situations and developing a new creativity.