Raoul Hausmann, self-styled “dadasoph“, “Director of the Circus Dada“, and autodidact, was among the most prolific and original artists of his time.  Working as a painter, typographer, photographer, writer, fashion designer, dancer, theorist and publisher, Hausmann invented the “Optophon“, a device that correlates sight and sound, as well as the Sound- and Posterpoem.  He developed the principle of the Dada photomontage with his companion at the time, Hannah Höch. Born in Vienna and living in Berlin from 1900, he was one of the founders of the Berlin Dada group and editor of the “dada“ magazine. He collaborated with many artists of the European avant-garde. Among his closest friends were Kurt Schwitters and László Moholy-Nagy. Studies on the theory of visual perception led him to photography, but only in 1927, on trips to the Baltic Sea and the Island of Sylt would Hausmann begin taking pictures. He made his final photographs in 1957. Hausmann did not consider himself a photographer in the strictest sense of the word, but rather as someone using the means of photography to illustrate his theories and to challenge radically the ordinary habits of seeing. Hausmann’s choice of apparently banal subjects and their purposefully undynamic and detached rendering open a vantage for the viewer outside his acquired viewpoint, in which all perception is focused on otherwise unnoticed details and perspectives.  Similarly, Hausmann’s experimental photographs also intended to broaden the viewer’s visual perception. Hausmann emigrated from Germany to Ibiza in 1933, where he stayed until 1936. Between 1936 and 1939, he moved between Zurich, Prague and Paris. In 1939 Hausmann moved on to Provence, moving again in 1944 to Limoges, where he died in 1971.