![]() ![]() He describes many self-invented methods mocking up and photographing props and, long before Photoshop, laboriously working up “roughs” by trial and error in the darkroom. Kennard sharply distinguishes collage (“where often fragments deliberately don’t cohere”) from photomontage, the deliberate construction of an image. Back then, he worked with the Troops Out movement and his montage protesting the use of rubber bullets is a howl of righteous wrath. ![]() With equal fury, he marks Bloody Sunday in Derry, and the judicial scandals of the Birmingham Six, Guilford Four and Maguire Seven. With little ceremony, he blazes off into 1969, excoriating Kissinger and Nixon, who escalated the blanket bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos – a neoimperial paradigm he traces though the 1973 CIA-backed coup in Chile to Afghanistan today. The results can be hard to dislodge from one’s brain. Each is a searing critique, his stark visual equations soldering oft-denied causal connections between hunger, poverty, war and advanced capitalism. It’s a dense, angry, funny, eye-popping tome: the awesome imagery flowing in a relentless stream. His new picture book, Visual Dissent, celebrates 50 years in business tolling each year with a text marking global landmarks of outrage, all prismed through his massive back catalogue. Forever fusing the fantastical with the apocalyptic, gallows humour with moral purpose, shock tactics with consummate artistry, old-school London lefty Peter Kennard remains the John Heartfield of contemporary British photomontage.
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