Cheng, JoyceCleary, Elizabeth2024-01-092024-01-092024-01-09https://hdl.handle.net/1794/29138The Mexican-Hungarian photographer Kati Horna (1912–2000) photographed the Spanish Civil War and created photomontages for the anarchist organization, the CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo-Federación Anarquista Ibérica/National Labor Confederation-Iberian Anarchist Federation) between 1937 and 1938. Scholarship to date has debated whether Horna’s political activism or her association with interwar avant-garde groups played a greater role in her work. In this thesis, I suggest that Horna’s political activism and her associations with Dada, Constructivism and Surrealism are inseparable aspects of her work by tracing Horna’s work from Hungarian Activism in the mid-1910s to what has been described as humanitarian photography in the 1930s. I argue that Horna’s work reveals the proximity of the avant-garde groups on the one hand and, on the other, the ambiguous relationship between art and politics during the European interwar years.en-USAll Rights Reserved.avant-gardehumanitarianKati HornaphotographyphotomontageSpanish Civil WarElectronic Thesis or Dissertation