1. Photo Op – Peter Kennard, 2010
With a career spanning almost 50 years, Peter Kennard is one of Britain’s most important political artists and possibly its leading practitioner of photomontage. The artist’s adoption of the medium in the late 1960s restored an association with radical politics and drew inspiration from the anti-Nazi montages of John Heartfield in the 1930s. The Iraq war in 2003 prompted Kennard to reconnect with the process of photomontage. A collaboration with Cat Phillipps used digital technology to create one of the archetypal images of the conflict. Photo Op, picturing a grinning Tony Blair posing for a selfie in front of burning oil wells in an arid landscape and became a visual shorthand for Blair’s controversial Iraq policy.