ALEXANDRO “ALEX” LEME
UALR – Donaghey Scholars Program
NHCH 2013
Student Interdisciplinary Research Submission
Title: “Straight Documentary Photography and Surrealism: A Dialectical Resolution”
The origin of Surrealism can be traced back to early 20th century Paris, where it began as
a literary movement. Surrealist writers sought to free the subconscious from any logical or
mediated responses by experimenting with the concept of automatism or automatic writing.
Surrealism achieved its first victories precisely in the realm of poetry. But it was in 1924, with
the publication of the Manifeste du Surréalisme by the poet André Breton, that the Surrealist
movement was officially launched. Surrealism would later become an international current of
thought that often instigated both positive and negative intellectual and political responses.
Surrealists were influenced by psychological theories and dream studies developed by
Sigmund Freud along with political ideologies proposed by Karl Marx in the 19th century. Based
on Freudian methods of free association, Surrealist poetry and prose explored the private world
of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce surprising,
unexpected imagery. André Breton, in his Manifeste du Surréalisme, describes Surrealism as
“the psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means
of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought.”1 The Surrealist
movement also finds its ancestry, as well as its disregard for the traditional concepts of what art
is supposed to be in Dadaism.
Initially, Surrealist writers dismissed the idea that Surrealism could be represented in the
visual arts. They believed that the deliberate and laborious natures of painting, sculpting, and
1
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1969), 26.
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drawing were in opposition to the spontaneity and uninhibited expression inherent within
Surrealist concepts. Furthermore, the idea of incorporating Surrealism into photography, which
was viewed as merely an effort to copy reality, seemed outrageous. Fascination with its effects,
awareness of its potential to revolutionize the visual arts and distrust of its mimetic nature
summarizes Surrealist attitudes towards photography in earlier texts.
This belief, nonetheless, was changed by Man Ray’s portrait of Marquise Casati, ca.
1922 (figure 1). In this photograph, Man Ray accidentally blurred the subject’s face, thus
creating both a dream-like effect and the illusion that the woman had more than two eyes. A
whole new set of possibilities within photography had just unveiled itself. Even though by
chance, the incident was enough to show that reality could indeed be manipulated through
photography. Consequently, photography’s presumed eccentricity to Surrealist thought and
practice had to be reconsidered.2
Surrealism in photography was hitherto performed mainly by the actual manipulation of
the images through techniques such as photomontage, photogram, multiple exposure,
solarization, and glass negative. As diverse as these techniques may have been, there is one form
that merits further development: the Surrealist, but straight, documentary photography. What is
more, numerous studies have already scrutinized several aspects of the staged and manipulated
photography produced within Surrealism. Little, however, has been explored surrounding ideas
of documentary photography. For this reason, this paper endeavors to disassemble the barriers
between “the real and the surreal,” ultimately striving towards their dialectical resolution.
Primarily, this task entails the investigation of photographs published in Surrealist books
and magazines. Underpinning this study is the premise that a single photograph may shift
meaning as it moves from the place where it has been taken to the place where it is published or
2
Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (Winter, 1981): 3-34.
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viewed. It is therefore assumed that the articulation of the work within the context of its
reception can unveil its Surrealist dimension.
Secondly, perhaps less factual but equally
important, it is the exercise of probing into what the Surrealists, chiefly André Breton, might
have said about photography and, when hard evidence lacks, how one might read an image
through Surrealist lenses. This effort proves especially relevant with works that do not come
from within the traditional ideas of the Surrealist movement itself, but can be placed next to and
in juxtaposition with Surrealism. Nevertheless, if one is to oppose the latter approach, it should
suffice to understand that the Surrealists themselves were “guilty” of re-contextualizing, often by
re-titling paintings in order to suggest alternative [Surreal] readings of the works. As a matter of
fact, it is known that de Chirico complained about the Surrealist habits of changing the titles of
his paintings when he once stated: “it twisted the meaning of his work and set the stage for an
ambiguity that is dangerous for the market.”3
However, any Surrealist theorization of
photography is fragmentary and elusive, and the reading of it must be consciously retrospective.
With that in mind, this essay intends to show that Surrealist documentary photography
can subvert the very ‘straightness’ of the medium and its apparent realism in order to create the
surreal. In fact it claims that this type of documentary photography can be more disruptive of
conventional norms than the contrivances of darkroom manipulation. To forge this argument
and narrow the scope of this research project, I chose to focus on works made in Paris in the
years between the two World Wars.
In the 1920s and 1930s, this genre of documentary photography largely took place in and
around city settings, where the banal and the extraordinary coexist on a daily basis. Across
Paris, for example, photographers identified several privileged places, especially resonant for
3
M. Guerrisi, La nueva pittura: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, De Chirico, Modigliani (Torino: Dell-Erma,
1932), 64-65.
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personal or cultural reasons, which had always been an important facet of Surrealism. In his first
collection of essays Les Pas Perdus in 1923, Breton wrote: “The street, which I believed could
furnish my life with its surprising detours; the street, with its cares and its glances, was my true
element: there I could test like nowhere else the winds of possibility.”4 The very site where the
image was made no longer functioned as mere background to a central subject, but also occupied
as important of a role as any other element within the composition.
Although this paper is centered on photography, an analysis of Joan Miró’s painting
titled: “Photo: this is the color of my dreams,” dated to 1925 (figure 2) should help foreground
how interlinked photography was – sometimes physically, often conceptually – with other media
utilized by Surrealists. Miró’s painting, almost featureless, is composed of three elements: the
word “photo” written in large letters on the upper left, a single patch of blue paint on the right,
and inscribed below it the phrase: “This is the color of my dreams.” Most commentaries on the
painting concentrate on the patch of blue paint. This seems to deny, however, the importance of
the other, equally significant, element in the composition: the large calligraphic word Photo in
the top left corner. This word informs the viewer that this is a reproduction of the color of the
artist’s dreams, which is blue. One could argue that in order to establish the status of his blue as
having the force of truth, Miró calls upon a central element in the power of photography: the way
it records, apparently without commentary, but precisely and directly, whatever might be before
the camera.
According to Barbara Rose, nonetheless, this painting is a gesture of resistance to the
increasingly prevalent role of photography within Dadaism and Surrealism. Miró, she argues, is
exposing the imaginative limitations of photography, since dreams, like angels, cannot be
4
André Breton, The Lost Steps (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 4.
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photographed.5 Yet this ignores the way that the transcriptive power of photography can itself
seem magical, despite – indeed because of – its chemical directness.
Photography’s very
reliance on chemistry makes it seem alchemical.6 Miró’s evocation of photography as metaphor
for an apparently contrary form of poetic creativity – a documentation that is also magic – finds
echoes elsewhere in Surrealism. Most pointedly, there is the early remark by André Breton:
“The invention of photography dealt a mortal death blow to old means of expression, as much in
painting as in poetry, where automatic writing… is a veritable photography of thought.”7
While automatic writing is the direct, unedited, and unmediated workings of the
unconscious, in a photograph, the Surrealist realism must consist of more than mere reproduction
of the surface of reality. It must also try to reveal connections and meanings normally obscured
or overlooked. In photography, the idiosyncrasies of la vie quotidienne can become forever
frozen in time, thus creating a whole host of new possibilities and strange discoveries to both the
photographer and the viewer. Arthur Rimbaud once observed: “the artist is a visionary […] his
task is to render visible and legible whatever lay beneath, or beyond the visual.”8 For that
reason, it is photography’s very nature, due to both its connection and disconnection with reality,
as well as its mechanical and automatic qualities, that make it the perfect Surrealist tool.
The Surrealist unwrapping of this social fantasy, the disturbance and dislocation of the
commonplace - otherwise imperceptible in the course of everyday life - is most prominently
manifested in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Even though his work never appeared in any
Surrealist publications, Cartier-Bresson made some of his best early pictures out of the space
5
Barbara Rose, Miró in America (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 16.
Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2002), 80.
7
André Breton, The Lost Steps (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 60.
8
Arthur Rimbaud; quoted in Christian Bouqueret, Introduction to Surrealist Photography (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2007), unpaginated.
6
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between the event and its photograph, between the obvious and the elusive. This would later
coin the idea of the decisive moment, which Christian Bouqueret best described as:
A concept devoid of ‘magic,’ the decisive moment is an extraordinary skill
at extrapolating signs, the visible marks of that which lies behind things,
and at perceiving the dislocations and surreptitious anomalies that can
dramatically transform an ordinary or even picturesque scene into
something strange and deeply disturbing.9
In 1976, Cartier-Bresson, then at the height of his reputation as one of the most important
and influential of documentary photographers, decided to use a quotation from André Breton as
the epigram for an anthology of his pictures: “Actually it’s quite true that he’s not waiting for
anyone since he’s not made an appointment, but the very fact he’s adopting this ultra-receptive
posture means that by this he wants to help chance along, how should I say, to put himself in a
state of grace with chance, so that something might happen, so that someone might drop in.”10
Not only did Cartier-Bresson, through this quotation, emphasized the vital role that Surrealist
notions of chance had in the formation of his work method in the early 1930s, but he also
implied that this influence had underpinned his work ever since.
This influence is apparent in Cartier-Bresson’s La Place de l‘Europe from 1932 (figure
3). In this photograph, Cartier-Bresson captured a man frozen in mid-air as he jumps over a
puddle. The photograph depicts the exact moment in which the subject had his legs extended as
he leaps over the flooded terrain. His image is reflected on the water below. In the top left
corner of the picture, juxtaposed to the figure of the man jumping, a poster of a dancer almost
precisely mimics the man’s action. Similarly, the reflection of the poster appears mirrored on the
water below. The figures are silhouetted against a deserted landscape next to a railroad. The
9
Bouqueret, Surrealist Photography, unpaginated.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Henri Cartier-Bresson (New York: Aperture, 1976), unpaginated.
10
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photograph is unusually dark for Cartier-Bresson, capturing the gloom of a northern city in the
winter. The rhythm between the workman and dancer has a nagging pointlessness, which Breton
found so haunting in the chance juxtapositions of street posters and reality.11 There is an
unsettling quality to this image. The disquieting nature of the photograph lies in its setting, a sort
of wasteland of indecisiveness, a terrain vague. The site itself, behind the railway station, is a
site of passage and flux, a place that is also a “non-place.” The photograph serves no apparent
social purpose. Rather, it records a sliver of time and space. It memorializes and creates an
image that can only exist as a photograph, for its surreality rests in the welding together of the
real and the constructed. That man was once there, but now he is a flat silhouette, dynamic yet
forever frozen. His suspension in mid-air is just a function of the camera’s ability to stop
motion. But this does not explain the picture. Indeed, like many of Cartier-Bresson’s early
pictures, its power lies precisely in its refusal of explanation.
On other occasions, this refusal seemed even more deliberate. In Valencia in 1933,
Cartier-Bresson photographed a small boy against a gouged and battered wall (figure 4). The
boy looks up as if in an expression of happiness. One might take it, however, as a representation
of disorientation, or even of mental disturbance. Ben Maddow reported that the boy had thrown
a ball into the air and was waiting for it to come down.12 That, in fact, may have been the
original event, but one which has long since been gone. The ball is a red herring. It is
eliminated from the frame at the crucial instant the image was made. It no longer exists, just as
the man jumping the water will never land. The photographer is not interested in reproduction,
but rather in exploring the ontological gaps in photography, the world that lays out of the shot,
with the suggestion that reality has been interrupted in such a manner that the viewer is
11
12
André Breton, Nadja (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 129.
Ben Maddow, Faces (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977), 494.
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challenged to ponder about what actually happened and what appears to have happened.
Photographically, this may be a decisive moment, but it is hardly one that draws together the
elements of the scene in order to explicate them. In narrative terms, the photograph is rather
inconclusive.
Ultimately, the viewer is confronted with an unresolved ambiguity that is
Surrealist to the core.
A comparison between the work of Cartier-Bresson and other photographers working in
Paris around the same timeframe can also help illustrate the idea of Surrealist documentary
photography. One of André Kertész’s earliest 35mm pictures was taken in 1928 in the Paris
suburb of Meudon (figure 5). This photograph has become one of the key images in a Surrealist
reading of his photography.13 Kertész’s image has some features in common with the previously
seen La Place de l‘Europe by Cartier-Bresson (figure 3). The setting is also some sort of vague
terrain through which a railway line passes. Both photographs captured a fleeting moment when
relationships are formed by the camera that a split second later will have gone. But beyond that,
the pictures are quite different.
Rather than the single event on which Cartier-Bresson’s
photograph is centered, the effect of Kertész’s image relies on the relationships between the man
and the train, the man and his package, and the man and the photographer. Caught in mid-stride,
the man heads toward the camera and, by seemingly staring at the photographer, invites the
viewer into the scene. The power of this photograph rests in the harvesting of time and motion
that even though suspended is also fleeting; the train will continue to its destination, and the man
will complete his errand. Whereas Cartier-Bresson’s vision is fragmented and dissociative,
Kertész’s photograph appears more complete.
In either case, however, the cityscape and life
permeate the imagination of both photographers.
13
Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism (Cleveland: New Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1979), 21.
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To see works that foreshadow the Surrealist fascination with the urban environment,
nonetheless, one must refer back to paintings made by Giorgio de Chirico before the First World
War. Albeit much of de Chirico’s work was rooted on a longing for the classical past - which
opposed the modernist inclinations of Surrealists - it was often also possible to transpose his
urban landscapes into modern Paris. In fact, de Chirico himself did so when he named one of his
paintings Gare Montparnasse, The Melancholy of Departure (figure 6).
Far in the distance, beyond the hard-lined, solid-colored grandiose of the abstracted
façade, a small black train is belching out smoke as it enters the station. Only two small figures,
their shadows cast on the ground, seem to inhabit an otherwise desolate landscape. They head
toward the station, where the train is soon to arrive. Similar to Kertész’s Meudon (figure 5), de
Chirico stops motion and time and thus presents the viewer with an instant that would otherwise
be forever gone. Again, it is what lies outside the composition, in the subconscious, that makes
the image. The once deserted landscape is about to become populated by those who arrive; the
figures in the distance will soon catch the train, which will invariably continue to its final
destination. De Chirico transcends the banality of urban landscapes and creates, in turn, a world
that could be real, but for its polysemy, remains enigmatic; therein lays its surreality.
In Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Breton recognizes in de Chirico’s paintings an effective
cityscape of the imagination, a concept which is inherently Surrealist.14 “De Chirico’s city was
not only a space to put next to the actual city, but also one to place – palimpsest like – over it, so
that the actual city and the imagined city were fused. Reality was infiltrated by the dream, the
present infiltrated by the past,”15 explained Ian Walker. For Breton, de Chirico represented the
14
15
André Breton, Surrealism and Painting (New York: Icon, 1972), 13.
Walker, Interwar Paris, 37.
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force majeure in the creation of a truly modern mythology, one upon which the perception of
time and space needed to be revisited.
The dual image of the street as a site of mystery and pleasure, threat and invitation, also
found expression in Brassai’s work. Unlike Cartier-Bresson, but similar to many Surrealists,
Brassai was a nightwalker that meandered about the streets of Paris photographing the city with
its characters at night. His photographs often recorded the darker and more obscure corners of
the city. In one of Brassai’s photographs entitled Brothel dated to 1933 (figure 7), a mirror is
placed in the corner of a space - in this case the room of a brothel – showing the occupants of
that room. The mirrors are framed by the rectilinear shape of the armoire, which is outlined by
the geometric patterns of the wallpaper. In front of it, a man, dressing, stands looking into the
mirror on one of its doors, while his partner’s naked body is captured in a virtual image that is
framed by the mirror on the other door. Present only in reflection, the woman is displaced from
her position in real space and transported to a relation of direct spatial contiguity with her client.
In the meeting that is enacted on the picture plane alone, the couple produces a transient, fleeting
sign of the meaning of their encounter, its anonymous sex represented by their faceless
juxtaposition in the mirrors, by the closure of two bodies back to back in real space. Rosalind
Krauss in her article Nightwalkers explained that Brassai often used the technique of mise en
abyme, the placement within one representation of another representation that reduplicates the
first.16
The corner of the room fills the entire frame of the photograph; the frame of the armoire
contains the image of the couple; the mirror on the left side contains the image of the woman.
But one can also read it from inside out, so that the obvious virtuality of what is present only in
the mirrored space spreads outward to include and encompass the imaged world on the other side
16
Rosalind Krauss, “Nightwalkers,” Art Bulletin 41, no. 1 (Spring, 1981): 37.
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of the mirror and finally the photograph as a whole. The viewer is forced to acknowledge that
the virtuality of the figures seen in reflection is no greater, or less, than the virtuality of the real
figures seen in the direct representational field of the photograph. According to Christian
Bouqueret: “Brassai exposes the reality that has been stripped of its familiar masks, and allows
us a glimpse of connections, gaps, faults – a great network which is normally unseen and which
constitutes precisely what Breton had despairingly hoped for in the photographs that illustrated
his novel Nadja.”17 It is because of this process of transformation of the real into a field of
representations that one might come to read the very bodies of these actors as symbols, as a
surreal depiction of a suspended reality.
Furthermore, eroticism is also undoubtedly a
mechanism through which Surrealism is often manifested.
Whereas Brassai and Kertész came into contact with Surrealism when they were already
well established, Cartier-Bresson discovered it before he began to make photographs and,
therefore, the influence was much deeper. Unlike Brassai and Kertész, Cartier-Bresson was
happy to acknowledge the importance of that influence.
Indeed, his adherence to the
fundamental principles of Surrealism were such that “there is justification for the opinion that in
the early 1930s Cartier-Bresson was the best and most mature of the Surrealist photographers,
although his work does not appear in any of the Surrealist periodicals.”18
Paradoxically,
understanding Cartier-Bresson’s early works becomes crucial to fully comprehending the
concept of Surrealist documentary photography, even as it was peripheral to the Surrealist
movement itself.
There are enough internal clues to suggest that even though the questions raised here
were not consciously theorized by the Surrealists at the time, they were intuitively embedded in
17
Bouqueret, Surrealist Photography, unpaginated.
Van Deren Coke and Diana C. Dupont, Photography: A Facet of Modernism (San Francisco: Museum of Art,
1986), 76.
18
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the ways that pictures were made and the ways they were used.
If there is a common
denominator to these photographs, then it is that they betray willingness on the part of the
photographer to record the visible, rather than a desire to modify or subvert it. Insistence on
dreaming was never meant to separate the surreal from the real, to relegate the former to a zone
where imaginative activity might be kept safely remote from the world of observed reality.
“What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only
real,” 19 Breton once observed. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the Surrealists favored
photography as the medium for its experiments. After all, Breton wanted a tale that would be
more realistic than a novel.
There are also many lessons here for the photographic contemporary practice: lessons
about how the documentary genre can incorporate subjectivity, ambiguity and reflexivity; and
about how images can be made which acknowledge both their constructed and indexical qualities
– images that can be expressions of both desire and fragments from the real world.
19
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1969), 4.
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Figure 1. Man Ray, American (1890-1976). Marquise Casati. 1922, silver gelatin print.
Figure 2. Joan Miró, Spanish (1893-1983). Photo: this is the color of my dreams. 1925.
Figure 3. Henri Cartier-Bresson, French (1908-2004). La Place de l’Europe, Paris 1932, Silver gelatin print.
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Figure 4. Henri Cartier-Bresson, French (1908-2004). Valencia, 1933, Silver gelatin print.
Figure 5. André Kertész, Hungarian (1894-1985). Meudon, 1928, Silver gelatin print.
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Figure 6. Giorgio de Chirico, Italian (1888-1978). Gare Monteparnasse (The Melancholy of Departure), 1914. Oil on canvas, 55.1 x 112 inches.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Figure 7. Brassai, Hungarian (1899-1984). Brothel, 1933, Silver gelatin print.
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