Documentary Photography and Surrealism in Interwar Paris: A Dialectical
Resolution
Surrealism aims to reduce, and ultimately to resolve, the contradictions between
sleeping and waking, dream and action, reason and madness, the conscious and the
unconscious, the individual and society, the subjective and the objective. It aims to
free the imagination from the mechanisms of psychic and social repression, so that
the inspiration and exaltation heretofore regarded, as the exclusive domain of poets
and artists will be acknowledged as the common property of all. André Breton
The origin of Surrealism can be traced back to early twentieth 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 (18961966), 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 nineteenth 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
1 of 40
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
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. Man Ray (1890-1976), after all, attempted to make his photography automatic, as
a writer would with a typewriter.2
Consequently, photography’s presumed eccentricity to
Surrealist thought and practice had to be reconsidered.3
In spite of their prolificacy in so many directions, the Surrealists themselves never
published a real manifesto on photography. Their concepts often unfolded “in acts” without any
“apparent” logical linearity, other than the preoccupation of advancing their ideas as they came
into being.
Photography, however, pervaded all the group’s activities.
What is more,
1
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1969), 26.
2
La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film, exhibition catalogue, 23 September 2009-11 January
2010, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France: 16.
3
Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (Winter, 1981): 3-34.
2 of 40
photographs were more than mere illustrations; the texts accompanied them as much as they
accompanied the texts in their books, tracts, reviews and periodicals. Photography was often
also collected among them, and even became the inspiration for games.4
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. In
addition, numerous studies have already scrutinized several aspects of the staged and
manipulated photography produced within Surrealism.
Little, however, has been explored
surrounding ideas of straight photography. For this reason, my work proposes the Hegelian
reconciliation between such dualisms as the odd and the familiar, the unconscious and the
conscious, the real and the constructed. In summary, 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
viewed. It is therefore assumed that the articulation of the work within the context of its
reception can unveil its Surrealist dimension. For if there is any venue, argued Dawn Ades,
through which the movement can be best studied and its activity better understood, it is that of its
periodicals: “The life of the movement in its fullest sense is to be found […] in the surrealist
periodicals – not as a monolithic expression of surrealism, but as a terrain of debate, of creation,
and criticism. It is also in the periodicals that the range and resources of photography within
4
La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film: 3.
3 of 40
surrealism are most fully realized.”5 Therefore, one must recognize that the documentary aspect
of photography - its association with what is vulgarly understood as reality - within these
publications was constantly being both displayed and challenged.
Secondly, perhaps less factual but equally important, 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 acknowledge 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.”6
Furthermore, when photographs illustrated in the surrealist
periodicals received captions, these captions were sometimes used in order to alter the
signification of an image.7 For example, on the cover of the sixth issue of La Révolution
surréaliste (March 1926), Man Ray’s dada photograph, Moving Sculpture (figure 2) was titled
“France,” which transformed its flowing white sheets into ghostly shrouds, or into a symbol of
patriotic honor, the national flag – but here represented as drooping, multiplied and amorphous
blank objects. Nonetheless, not all of the photographs found in these magazines were made by
the surrealists themselves or by photographers that the surrealists adopted. Several were simply
5
Dawn Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist text,” in L’Amour Fou: Photography & Surrealism, eds. Rosalind
Krauss and Jane Livingston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 155.
6
M. Guerrisi, La nueva pittura: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, De Chirico, Modigliani (Torino: Dell-Erma,
1932), 64-65.
7
Krauss, L’Amour fou, 159.
4 of 40
collected [by chance] in the streets of Paris, or in junkyards, public markets, and/or popular
scientific publications. In fact, many of those photographs were anonymous. Therefore, any
Surrealist theorization of photography can be 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 and/or published
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
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.” 8 The very site where the
image was made no longer functioned as mere background to a central subject, but also occupied
as important 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 3) should help foreground
how interlinked photography was – sometimes physically, often conceptually – with other media
8
André Breton, The Lost Steps (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 4.
5 of 40
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
photographed.9 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.10 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.”11
9
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.
11
André Breton, The Lost Steps (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 60.
10
6 of 40
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.” 12 Perhaps one of
the most eloquently elaborated argument about the automaticity and photography’s capacity to
transform reality was made by André Bazin in 1945: “For the first time an image of the world is
formed automatically […] the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real
tends to disappear […] Hence photography ranks high in the order of Surrealist creativity
because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, a hallucination that is also a
fact.”13 For that reason, it is photography’s very nature, due to both its connection and its
disconnection with reality, as well as its mechanical and automatic qualities, that makes it the
perfect Surrealist tool.
Breton, however, was not interested in whether or not photography was considered art.
Instead, he was concerned with challenging photography’s “unmediated” and “unadulterated”
mimesis, and while addressing Man Ray’s work in Surrealism and Painting, he explained that
Man Ray “had applied himself vigorously to the task of stripping it [photography] of its positive
nature, of forcing it to abandon its arrogant air and pretentious claims” of reproducing external
reality “faithfully:”
12
Arthur Rimbaud; quoted in Christian Bouqueret, Introduction to Surrealist Photography (London: Thames &
Hudson, 2007), unpaginated.
13
André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Vol. I (Berkeley: University of
California, 1967), 13.
7 of 40
The photographic print, considered in isolation, is certainly permeated with an emotive
value that makes it a supremely precious article of exchange (and when will all the books
that are worth anything stop being illustrated with drawings and appear only with
photographs?); nevertheless, despite the fact that it is endowed with a special power of
suggestion, it is not in the final analysis the faithful image that we aim to retain of
something that will soon be gone forever. 14
Paradoxically, there were situations in which Breton used photography as a way of
authenticating the “non-fictional” character of his texts.
In other words, he found in
photography’s reputation as a medium that records “the real,” the perfect mechanism to anchor
his text in reality. For example, Breton commissioned Jacques-André Boiffard (1902-1961) to
produce some of the photographic illustrations for his book entitled Nadja, published in 1928. In
order to convince his readers that Nadja was a true story, Breton used a series of artifices that
would [as he hoped] distance his text from that of a novel, which included the use of
photographs, the presentation of pages of a diary, and the adoption of a tone of “medical
observation.”15 Therefore, the photographs of the streets, alleyways, monuments, squares, and
cafes of Paris became vital in establishing that the book was not a fictional narrative. Moreover,
by including photographs, Breton could avoid the lengthy divagations of verbal descriptions and
the literary vacuity often associated with nineteenth-century “realist” novels condemned in the
first Manifesto.
Boiffard’s photographs (figures 4 and 5) recorded the place where they happened rather
than what happened in these sites. Taken in deadpan, these photographs had an inherently
distant, withdrawn quality, which allowed the successful replacement of the photographer’s
individual experience for that of someone else, in this case, the writer.
14
15
Hence, Breton’s
Krauss, L’Amour fou, 160.
Krauss, L’Amour fou, 161.
8 of 40
dedicatory to Boiffard in a copy of the book: “To Jacques-André Boiffard, to whom I owe the
most beautiful photographs in this book and through whose eyes I have seen the true sites known
by mine.”16 It is for their “banality,” nonetheless, that these photographs have often been
recognized. Michel Beaujour described Nadja as:
The narration of an ethnological expedition toward the interior of a singularly disquieting
town, a haunted Paris that unveils little by little its sorceries, admits its periodic ritual
human sacrifices, proffers its possessed and its mirages, which the camera has been able to
capture and present us as if we were there. However, what we are shown is nothing: not
only have the places defended themselves against the photographer, but those that have
allowed themselves to be captured […] are quite dumb; nothing is suggested in these banal
photographs (voluntary banality, no doubt: had he wished to suggest the marvelous of
these places, Breton would have gone to Man Ray, who made several portraits of Nadja).
These photographs, almost empty of human presence, proceed from a zero-ground of
representation: they never move away from the amateur’s snapshot or the out-of-date
picture postcard […] their banality is less a result of the photographer’s lack of skill than
of his will not to inflect the shot, not to make it say more than the eye of the savant has
taken in.
For Roger Shattuck, however, the strength of Boiffard’s images rested, in fact, in their
“apparent” flatness: “The quotidian takes on an intensity that makes the wan photographs seem
foreboding.”17 For it is in its very banality that Boiffard rendered Paris a site of wander, wonder
and mystery. After all, for the Surrealists, it was in the street where the unexpected could
happen, the chance encounter could take place, and where one could put him or herself in a state
of complete disponibilité, and insofar as one was willing to take the risk, he or she could happen
upon the marvelous. What is more, one must never disregard the fact that their “banality” was
16
Dominique Lecoq, quoted in Georges Bataille et Raymond Quneau, “Jacques-André Boiffard ou l’histoire d’un
oil,”, 1930-40, no. 4 (Clermont-Ferrand: n. pub., 1982), 40.
17
Roger Shattuck, “The Nadja File,” Cahiers Dada Surrealisme, 1 (1966), 55.
9 of 40
Breton’s choice: “I have begun by going back to look at several of the places to which this
narrative happens to lead; I wanted in fact – with some of the people and some of the objects – to
provide a photographic image of them taken at the special angle from which I myself had looked
at them.”18
The “marvelous,” for the surrealists, was often to be revealed rather than created. On the
look out for quirks of fate in everyday life, the photographers sought to encounter it in the most
unexpected places, in the banality and triviality of quotidian life. For André Breton, the real and
the marvelous were “connected vessels” coexisting in tandem and with the potency to reveal
itself in either or both forms at any given time. Per consequence, the relationship between work
of art and document became increasingly blurred. The artists were, in that sense, more like
treasure hunters in search of trouvailles (lucky finds), of absurd coincidences and unlikely
juxtapositions, tirelessly challenging the familiar in order to unearth its “bewildering
strangeness.” According to Jean Cocteau, it lies upon the poet - and dare I add, the photographer
- the responsibility to: “place objects from the visible world, rendered invisible by the eraser of
habit, in an untoward position that strikes the soul and imbues them with tragedy. One therefore
needs to compromise reality, to catch it out, to flood it unexpectedly with light and to make it
reveal what it is hiding.”19
Working in that vein, and perhaps the predecessor to the idea of photography functioning
as both a document of reality and a surrealist object, was French photographer Eugène Atget
(1857-1927). The Surrealists’ interest in Atget coincided with the publication of Louis Aragon’s
Le Paysan de Paris in 1926.20 Since the late nineteenth century, Atget had been systematically
making a [sort of] photographic inventory of an ever-changing Paris with its new urban
18
André Breton. Nadja. (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 153.
La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film: 12.
20
La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film: 20.
19
10 of 40
landscape and ongoing Haussmannisation – the radical rebuilding of the city by Baron
Haussmann. While Atget considered his work as “mere documents,” the Surrealists saw in it the
blossoming of a new “social fantasy,” of an “urban mythology” that aligned perfectly with the
increasingly popular poetry of the city. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that photographs
of window shops, random objects, monuments, and scenes of everyday life began to permeate
[more and more] the pages of surrealist texts, and excited the imagination of such names as
Jacques-André Boiffard, Berenice Abbott and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Atget, however, did not
allow his photographs to be published under his name in La Révolution surréaliste.21
In a photograph taken in the Place de La Bastille in 1912, Atget captured the moment
during which a small crowd gathered to watch the eclipse of the sun (Figure 6). This image
made the cover, and was one of three photographs by Atget published in issue no. 7 of La
Révolution surréaliste. Populating the lower half of the image, the crowd looks up toward the
top left corner of the photograph. The title added by the Surrealists offers the viewer a different
explanation to the event on display: “The Last Conversation.” With its religious innuendo, the
Surrealists wanted to poke fun at Catholicism [and organized religion in general] by showing a
group of ordinary Parisians in a recognizably ordinary part of the city who appeared to be
engaged in some sort of mass hysteria. In addition to that, in the top corner towards which the
crowd looks, Atget’s camera lens created a dark vignette, which one could claim to establish a
cynical metaphor for the eclipsed sun – or “the coming miracle.”22 Again, by simply changing
the title of the image the Surrealists encouraged the viewer to reconsider the apparent “banality”
of the event, which in turn, made the text and the photograph, the real and the surreal fuse into a
single [but ambiguous] discourse; one that was surrealist in its essence.
21
22
Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 17.
John Fuller, “Atget and Man Ray in the Context of Surrealism,” Art Journal, 36:2 (1976-77), 130-8. p.132.
11 of 40
Even though these evocations of the city as a site of fantasy and mystery harmonized
perfectly with the Surrealist ideas of the urban, no Surrealist writing about Atget’s work ever
made this connection explicitly. This task was left to an art critic from outside Surrealism,
Waldemar George, who wrote about Atget in a short review of the Salon de l’Escalier in 1928,
and later, as part of a longer text, in the special number of Arts et métiers graphiques in 1930. In
the latter essay, he wrote:
Before the Surrealist painter, Atget understood the potential and meaning of facts
juxtaposed, confronting each other without any logical line to justify their juxtaposition.
A quarter of a century before Louis Aragon, he wrote the Paysan de Paris, while probing,
while clearing away the waste rock, while stripping naked this immanent mystery that has
for a name: banality.23
George, therefore, undoubtedly placed Atget’s in a precise relation with fundamental
Surrealist attitudes; claiming even, that he [Atget] had long been producing surrealist work, even
before the concept of surrealism itself came in to being.
Though in a less focused manner, and subsequent to his death in 1927, two Surrealists
also wrote about Atget:
Robert Desnos and Albert Valentin.
Both, however, were more
interested in Atget’s image of Paris specifically. For Desnos, Atget had the ability to unleash the
marvelous, otherwise trapped in the complacency of everyday life: “His albums…comprise the
most fantastic dossier of marvels that our eyes can see each day but to which too often they do
not pay attention.”24 Valentin, on the other hand, focused on Atget’s images of the edges of
Paris, with its less frequented suburban neighborhoods where the working-class inhabited. He
often read those as sites of discomfort and threat: “In those dead-end streets in the outlying
neighborhoods, those peripheral districts […] we experience a certain malaise in contemplating
23
24
Translated by John Szarkowski, in Understandings of Atget, pp. 14-15.
Desnos, “Emile Adget”, 435.
12 of 40
the world we discover in the ten thousand plates Atget printed, although it is every inch our
own.”25
This image of an alienated Parisian periphery, a site that caused both estrangement and
fear is found in an earlier image by Atget titled Porte d’Ivry, impasse Massena, 18 and 20
Boulevard Massena, circa 1907-08 (figure 7). On the right side of the photograph, a building,
appearing to house a liquor store, is juxtaposed to a blurred, highly lit left side. The tree in the
middle seems to split the image in two: a sharply rendered, high-contrast right side against an
out-of-focus blown up left. On one end [right], life is only hinted at with an empty table with a
chair, a bucket sitting on the sidewalk and the view through the window of stocked shelves
inside the store. Though apparently more “ghostly” and mysterious, the left portion, demarcated
by the trees, displays a cat in the middle staring eerily at the camera. It is unclear as to whether
anybody lives or works there. There is a sense of imminence and disturbance, a theatre for
violent death and melodrama that Valentin often noted, and considered inherently surrealist, in
Atget’s work.26 For the surrealists, that sense of uneasiness was stimulating.
The Surrealist’s 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
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
25
26
Albert Valentin, "Eugène Atget", 20-1.
Ibid., 20-1.
13 of 40
and surreptitious anomalies that can dramatically transform an ordinary or even
picturesque scene into something strange and deeply disturbing. 27
In 1976, Cartier-Bresson, then at the height of his reputation as one of the most important
and influential 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.”28
Not only did Cartier-Bresson, through this quotation, emphasize 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
8). In this photograph, Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) captured a man frozen in mid-air as he
jumps over a puddle. The photograph depicts the exact moment in which the subject has 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 in the water below. The figures are silhouetted against a deserted landscape next to a
railroad.
The 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.29 There is an unsettling quality to this image. The disquieting nature of the photograph
27
Bouqueret, Surrealist Photography, unpaginated.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Henri Cartier-Bresson (New York: Aperture, 1976), unpaginated.
29
André Breton, Nadja (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 129.
28
14 of 40
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 9). 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. 30 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
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.
30
Ben Maddow, Faces (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977), 494.
15 of 40
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 (1894-1985) earliest 35mm pictures was taken in 1928 in
the Paris suburb of Meudon (figure 10). This photograph has become one of the key images in a
Surrealist reading of his photography.31 Kertész’s image has some features in common with the
previously seen La Place de l‘Europe by Cartier-Bresson (figure 9). The setting is also some
sort of vague terrain through which a railway line passes. Both photographs capture 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 CartierBresson’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 each
case, however, the cityscape and life permeate the imagination of both photographers.
To see works that foreshadow the Surrealist fascination with the urban environment,
nonetheless, one must refer back to paintings made by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) before
the First World War. Albeit much of de Chirico’s work was rooted in a longing for the classical
past - which opposed the modernist inclinations of Surrealists - it is often 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 11).
31
Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism (Cleveland: New Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1979), 21.
16 of 40
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 10), de
Chirico stops motion and time and thus presents the viewer with an instant that would otherwise
be forever gone. A sense of expectation, of emptiness emanates from de Chirico’s compositions:
the momentary emptiness is somehow suspended in time, but carrying a sense that in a matter of
seconds that scene will, in all likelihood, produce something irremediable.32 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 inherently Surrealist.33 “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,”34 explained Ian Walker. For Breton, de Chirico represented the force
majeure in the creation of a truly modern mythology, one upon which the perception of time and
space needed to be revisited.
What is more de Chirico’s recurring images of arches reaching deep into infinity
alongside solitary statues projecting their shadows onto the pavement of a deserted square; in the
32
Waldberg, Le Surréalisme, 30.
André Breton, Surrealism and Painting (New York: Icon, 1972), 13.
34
Walker, Interwar Paris, 37.
33
17 of 40
distance, a chiseled tower raising a flag; a tall industrial chimney, red, behind an empty temple; a
clock here and there, and the occasional locomotive appearing in the horizon across the city were
often passionately appropriated by the Surrealist.35
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 (1899-1984) 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, which, according to Brassai himself: “they [the surrealists] consider them
‘surrealist,’ because they [the photographs] revealed a ghostly, unreal Paris, drowned in the night
and the fog.”36 This relationship between Brassai and Surrealism becomes acutely clear in face
of the numerous times in which his photographs were used in Surrealist-influenced [and
controlled] magazines such as Minotaure, and in André Breton’s book L’Amour fou. As a matter
of fact, Brassai’s work was predominantly featured in six of the first seven issues of Minotaure,
with issue number seven (June 1935) focusing on his night photography. In the latter issue,
Brassai is extended a dominating presence with over seventeen photographs in all.37 A number
of these photographs, however, stood by themselves with little or no explicit relationship with
[Surrealist] texts, except for one, the image of La Tour Saint-Jacques, which is used to illustrate
Breton’s La Nuit du tournesol (figure 12).38
Two years later André Breton would recount one night when he and his soon-to-become
wife, Jacqueline Lamba, wandered the streets of Paris, which would later form the basis for his
book, L’Amour fou. In both the magazine and the book, the texts were illustrated with three of
35
Texte de Patrick Waldberg, “L’Étoile du Berger,” dans Le Surréalisme. (Geneve: Skire, 1962), 30.
Brassai, “Interview avec France Bequette,” Culture et communication, 27 (1978), 15.
37
Walker, Interwar Paris, 145.
38
Minotaure, 7 (June 1935), 48-55.
36
18 of 40
Brassai’s nocturnal photographs of the sites the couple had passed by that night: Les Halles, the
Tour Saint-Jacques, and the flower market. Apparently, Breton would later claim to have asked
Brassai to photograph these sites, but as Brassai later rebuffed: “Contrary to what the author of
Nadja thought at the time, however, these photographs had not been made specially for him. I
had had them for some time – even one of the Tour Saint-Jacques as he had described it,
‘beneath its ghostly veil of scaffolding’.”39
The fact that Brassai uses an appositive device, “the author of Nadja,” to refer to Breton
acknowledges both that he was aware of Jacques-André Boiffard’s photographs illustrated in
Nadja, and that his [Brassai’s images] were, perhaps, in direct competition with those of
Boiffard. It should, however, suffice to emphasize that while Breton commissioned Boiffard to
make photographs specifically for his book, Brassai’s were the result of an independent work
concerned with the artist’s own aesthetic and content considerations. Furthermore, the tone of
the aforementioned comment also suggests a tension between Brassai’s desire to separate and
claim complete creative authorship over his oeuvre independently of the use Breton made of it.
Often embedded in the Surrealist discourse and aesthetic sensibility, and certainly found
in Breton’s discussions about Surrealism, was the congruence between nature and art for its
power to produce a sensation that was intrinsically erotic:
I acknowledge without the least embarrassment my profound insensibility in the
presence of natural spectacles and works of art that do not immediately produce in me a
state of physical disturbance characterized by the sensation of a wind brushing across
my forehead and capable of causing a veritable shiver. I have never been able to resist
39
Brassai, Picasso and Company, Conversations with Picasso, trans. Jane May Todd (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999), 38.
19 of 40
relating this sensation to erotic pleasure, and can discover between them differences
only of degree.40
Breton’s remark not only places nature and art at the same level, but confides that both
can elicit a sensation that he compares with erotic pleasure [arousal]. As a matter of fact, it is no
secret that eroticism was a mechanism through which Surrealism often manifested itself:
“Beauty will be convulsive or not […] convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive,
magic-circumstantial or not.”41
The “erotic” was often hinted at, or sometimes very openly rendered in Brassai’s work.
In a photograph entitled Brothel dated to 1933 (figure 12), 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.42
The corner of the room fills the entire frame of the photograph; the frame of the armoire
contains the image of the couple; the frame of the mirror on the left side contains the image of
40
André Breton, “La Beaute sera convulsive,” Minotaure, no. 5, 1934; trans., David Gascoyne, in André Breton,
What is Surrealism? (New York: Monad Press, 1978), 160.
41
Ibid., 42.
42
Rosalind Krauss, “Nightwalkers,” Art Bulletin 41, no. 1 (Spring, 1981): 37.
20 of 40
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 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.”43 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. A reality that Brassai himself came to
qualify as the most surreal: “Yet the surrealism of my images was none other than reality
rendered fantastic through vision. I was only attempting to convey reality, for nothing is more
surreal.”44
In many cases, nonetheless, one must look outside Surrealism itself to fully comprehend
the cultural placement of Brassai’s oeuvre. It is, in this respect, especially relevant to look at
Brassai’s photographs in opposition to, and/or in connection with, the work that Atget was
producing decades earlier. When they first appeared in Minotaure in the early 1930s, Brassai’s
images seemed to have been read as a form of response to Atget’s images:
Brassai’s
contemporary Paris set against Atget’s antiquated image, and the dark shadows of night rendered
by Brassai opposed to the clarity of early morning daylight of Atget’s. As a matter of fact, Pierre
MacOrlan once acknowledged this dualism in his text on Atget: “Photographic views of Paris
43
44
Bouqueret, Surrealist Photography, unpaginated.
La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film: 18.
21 of 40
offer two different worlds: that of the day and that of the night. It is easier to exploit the night if
you want to stir the public’s curiosity. The elements of night are the great stage directors of a
social fantastic which is rather naïve and always easy to understand.”45 Even though it is
obvious that a relationship can be established between MacOrlan’s “social fantastic” and the
surrealist ideas presented in Nadja and Le paysan de Paris, these visions were very different in
the end. While the Surrealist dream-image in these books is hard and lucid, Brassai’s dark,
foggy Paris has the softness of a reverie. Whereas the latter brought the mysterious into his
imagery, the former aimed to unveil the marvelous. Surrealism is manifested in both modes
nonetheless.
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 Atget, 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.”46
Therefore,
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
45
Pierre MacOrlan, “Preface to Atget Photographe de Paris”, in Christopher Phillips (ed.), Photography in the
Modern Era (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), 47.
46
Van Deren Coke and Diana C. Dupont, Photography: A Facet of Modernism (San Francisco: Museum of Art,
1986), 76.
22 of 40
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,” 47 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 is no denying that any reading of these photographs must involve a lesser or
greater degree of construction, for there may be a lack of closure in many images that allows for
a multiplicity of readings. The view of this mode of photography should, however, by now be
reconsidered, and thus become a more comprehensive one. To think of those photographs as
“simply documents,” is to deny their power of suggestion, and to ignore the context under which
they were made and/or presented; it is a refusal to the Surrealist invitation to look behind the
curtain, underneath the surface where the marvelous and the surreal may reside. The Surrealists,
ultimately, did not seek an eradication of “realism” but a more complex understanding of it.48
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. This work
should also elicit more global questions that even though escaped the purview of this project, still
47
André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1969), 4.
48
Walker, Interwar Paris, 153.
23 of 40
remain entitled to further consideration. One must now, therefore, revisit and perhaps even
reconsider the role of the camera, chance, intuition, agency and authorship not only in
Surrealism, but also in photography as a medium, a process and an art form.
24 of 40
Figure 1. Man Ray, American (1890-1976). Marquise Casati, 1922. silver gelatin print.
25 of 40
Figure 2. Man Ray, American (1890-1976). Moving Sculpture, 1920. silver gelatin print.
26 of 40
Figure 3. Joan Miró, Spanish (1893-1983). Photo: this is the color of my dreams. 1925.
27 of 40
Figure 4. Jacques-André Boiffard, My point of departure will be the Hotel des Grands
Hommes… (from Nadja), 1928.
28 of 40
Figure 5. Jacques-André Boiffard, The words BOIS-CHARBONS (from Nadja), 1928.
29 of 40
Figure 6. Eugène Atget, The Eclipse (published on the cover of La Révolution surrealiste issue
no. 7), 1912.
30 of 40
Figure 7. Eugène Atget, Porte d’Ivry, impasse Massena, 18 and 20 Boulevard Massena, c. 19071908.
31 of 40
Figure 8. Henri Cartier-Bresson, French (1908-2004). La Place de l’Europe, Paris 1932, Silver
gelatin print.
32 of 40
Figure 9. Henri Cartier-Bresson, French (1908-2004). Valencia, 1933, Silver gelatin print.
33 of 40
Figure 10. André Kertész, Hungarian (1894-1985). Meudon, 1928, Silver gelatin print.
34 of 40
Figure 11. 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.
35 of 40
Figure 12. Extract from André Breton, “La Nuit du tournesol,” with photograph by Brassai, La
tour Saint-Jacques, in Minotaure, 7 (1935). Photograph © Estate Brassai.
36 of 40
Figure 13. Brassai, Hungarian (1899-1984). Brothel, 1933, Silver gelatin print.
37 of 40
Bibliography
Ades, Dawn. “Photography and the Surrealist text,” in L’Amour Fou: Photography &
Surrealism, eds. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, New York: Abbeville Press, 1985.
Ades, Dawn. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978).
Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1994.
Arrouye, Jean, “La photographie dans Nadja,” Melusine 4 (1981), 123-51.
Atget, Eugène. Atget: Photographe de Paris, text by Pierre MacOrlan (Paris: Henri
Jonquieres/New York: E. Weyhe Gallery, 1930).
Balakian, Anna. André Breton: Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford University Press,
1971).
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New
York: Hill and Wang, 1980.
Bazin, André, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema? Vol. I (Berkeley:
University of California, 1967).
Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Verson, 1994).
Beaujour, Michel. “Qu’est-ce que Nadja?,” Nouvelle Revu Francaise, 15:172 (April 1967), 78099.
Beaumont-Maillet, Laure. Atget’s Paris (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).
Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations
(London: Fontana, 1973): 219-53.
Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in One-Way
Street (London: New Left Books, 1979): 225-39.
Bonnet, Marguerite, André Breton et la naissance de l’aventure surréaliste (Paris: José Corti,
1975).
Bouqueret, Christian. Introduction to Surrealist Photography. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
Brassai, Brassai (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1963).
Brassai, Paris de nuit (Paris: Arts et métiers graphiques, 1932).
Brassai, The Secret Paris of the 30s (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976).
38 of 40
Brassai, Picasso and Company, Conversations with Picasso, trans. Jane May Todd (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1999).
Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard and Hellen R. Lane. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1969.
Breton, André. Nadja. New York: Grove Press, 1960.
Breton, André. Surrealism and Painting. New York: Icon, 1972.
Breton, André. The Lost Steps. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.
Breton, André. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Ed. Franklin Rosemont. New York:
Pathfinder, 1978.
Breton, André. L’Amour fou (Paris: Gallimard, 1937).
Breton, André. Ouvres Complètes, Vol. I, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).
Breton, André. Les Vases communicants (Paris: Gallimard, 1932).
Buckland, Gail. Reality Recorded: Early Documentary Photography. Greenwich: New York
Graphic Society, 1974.
Cartier-Bresson, Henri. Henri Cartier-Bresson. New York: Aperture, 1976.
Deren C., Van, and Diana C. Dupont. Photography: A Facet of Modernism. San Francisco:
Museum of Art, 1986.
De Sanna, Jole. “Giorgio de Chirico – André Breton: Duel à mort.” Metafisica, no. 1-2 (2002):
62-87.
Fuller, John, “Atget and Man Ray in the Context of Surrealism,” Art Journal, 36:2 (1976-77):
130-8.
Guerrisi, M. La nueva pittura: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, De Chirico, Modigliani.
Torino: Dell-Erma, 1932.
Grindon, Gavin. “Surrealism, Dada, and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism, and Social
Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde.” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 34, no. 1 (2011): 7996.
Hall-Duncan, Nancy. Photographic Surrealism. Cleveland: New Gallery of Contemporary Art,
1979.
Hammond, Paul. The Shadow and its Shadow. London: British Film Institute, 1978.
39 of 40
Hill, Paul, and Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1979).
Hollier, Denis, and Rosalind Krauss. “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows.”
October, Vol. 69 (Summer, 1994): 110-132.
Hubert R., Renée. “The Fabulous Fiction of Two Surrealist Artists: Giorgio de Chirico and Max
Ernst.” New Literary History, Vol. 4, no. 1 (Autumn, 1972): 151-166.
Hugnet, Georges, and Margaret Scolari. “In The Light of Surrealism.” The Bulletin of the
Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 4, no. 2/3 (1936): 19-32.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Night Walkers.” Art Bulletin, Vol. 41, no. 1 (Spring, 1981): 33-38.
Krauss, Rosalind. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” October, Vol. 19 (2005): 3-34.
Krauss, Rosalind. Under Blue Cup. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011.
La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film, exhibition catalogue, 23 September
2009-11 January 2010, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.
MacOrlan, Pierre, “Preface to Atget Photographe de Paris”, in Christopher Phillips (ed.),
Photography in the Modern Era (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989).
Maddow, Ben. Faces. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977.
Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Howard. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1995.
Olin, Margaret. “Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification.” Representations, vol. 80, no. 1
(Fall 2002): 99-118.
Rose, Barbara. Miró in America. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982.
Shattuck, Roger, “The Nadja File,” Cahiers Dada Surrealisme, 1 (1966).
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 1977.
Walker, Ian. City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar
Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.
Walker, Ian. So exotic, So Homemade: Surrealism, Englishness and Documentary Photography.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
40 of 40