Surrealism and Photography

Paper Summary:

This paper takes a look at the surrealist movement, explaining that it was, at the same time, a poetic, philosophical and political movement and that the advent and development of photography as an art form had a great impact on surrealism. The paper describes and analyzes some of the works of early surrealists, including Man Ray and Andre' Breton.

From the Paper:

"In a 1913 issue of Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work, de Zayas criticized the medium of photography for being a "concrete representation of consummated facts," which "drew away the veil of mystery with which Art enveloped the represented Form." [Perpetual, p. 16] Yet the budding surrealist movement was beginning to embrace photography as a novel mechanism for the expression of its ideals. Photography allowed for a randomness that was central to surrealist practice. The innovations in photographic and developing techniques - especially those of Man Ray - gave surrealists a larger forum to explore their ideas of unstable reality, dream-like states and bizarre juxtapositions of everyday images."

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