Surrealist photography

style 1920s-1940s France Europe

Surrealist photography covers both photographs made by Surrealists and photographs that came to carry Surrealist meanings through their use in Surrealist journals and books. From the 1920s to the 1940s the camera became one of the movement's favorite tools precisely because of its air of objectivity: photographs appeared throughout La Révolution surréaliste, Minotaure, and books such as André Breton's Nadja, where documentary images of streets, objects, and passersby were reframed as evidence of the marvelous. Practitioners exploited the medium's strangeness - the camera-less rayograph, solarization's reversed tones, double exposure, extreme close-up, and staged tableau - to defamiliarize the human body and the everyday object. The results range from Man Ray's witty visual puns to the disturbing doll photographs of Hans Bellmer and Claude Cahun's identity games.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)
The Tribuna of the Uffizi (Zoffany)Public domain (credit: Johann Zoffany) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Camera-less photograms (rayographs) arranging objects directly on light-sensitive paper
  • Solarization and negative reversal turning flesh and shadow into silvery silhouettes
  • Unlikely juxtapositions and visual puns within a single frame
  • Extreme close-ups, tilted framing, and dreamlike cropping of everyday things
  • Staged bodies, mannequins, and dolls that unsettle the boundary of the human
  • Found documentary photographs recontextualized in books and journals

Key figures

  • Man Ray (1890-1976) — Inventor of the rayograph and master of solarized portraiture and visual puns
  • Brassaï (1899-1984) — Photographed nocturnal Paris and its graffiti for Surrealist publications
  • Dora Maar (1907-1997) — Solarized portraits and photomontages at the center of Surrealist circles
  • Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) — Photographed his disarticulated doll sculptures to disturbing effect
  • Claude Cahun (1894-1954) — Staged self-portraits that dismantle gender and identity

Example works

  • Le Violon d'Ingres — Man Ray (1924)
  • Rayograph — Man Ray (1923)
  • Père Ubu — Dora Maar (1936)

Sources

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