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![Man Ray - [Jacqueline Goddard], 1930](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l2ivp225PM1qa3gu4o5_250.jpg)
How many techniques, processes or ways of seeing can you identify in this small selection of Surrealist photographs?
Why do you think photography was so fascinating to the Surrealists? In what ways did photography provide them with a means to combine the subjective and objective, the conscious and unconscious? How did it enable them to capture the marvelous in the everyday?
![Man Ray - Dust Breeding, 1920.
This photograph by Man Ray, associate of the surrealists in Paris, is famously enigmatic. What looks like a landscape seen from an airplane is in fact a layer of dust that had gathered on the surface of Marcel Duchamp’s even more famous art work The Large Glass (also called The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even). The photograph was made using a two hour long exposure. Duchamp eventually wiped the dust from the surface of his sculpture except for certain areas where it was fixed with glue, thus preserving it symbolically as the embodiment of the passage of time.
The title Dust Breeding contributes to the sense of disquiet that the tight cropping and unusual perspective create for the viewer. Many of the surrealists were fascinated by how the world looked at close quarters through a camera lens. Brassai and Dali’s Involuntary Sculptures, Dora Maar’s Portrait d’Ubu and Jacques-Andre Boiffard’s Big Toe reflect a more general interest in the capabilities of photography to stare closely at objects until they were transformed from being ordinary into something marvelous. Parallel to this interest was an increase in microphotography and the use of increasingly powerful lenses to capture scenes previously invisible to the human eye.
These images and more are reproduced in the excellent catalogue of the exhibition Close-Up: Proximity and De-Familiarisation in Art, Film and Photography, the cover of which features one of Mike Kelley’s photographs of dust that are a kind of contemporary response to Man Ray’s image above.
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Man Ray - Dust Breeding, 1920.
This photograph by Man Ray, associate of the surrealists in Paris, is famously enigmatic. What looks like a landscape seen from an airplane is in fact a layer of dust that had gathered on the surface of Marcel Duchamp’s even more famous art work The Large Glass (also called The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors Even). The photograph was made using a two hour long exposure. Duchamp eventually wiped the dust from the surface of his sculpture except for certain areas where it was fixed with glue, thus preserving it symbolically as the embodiment of the passage of time.
The title Dust Breeding contributes to the sense of disquiet that the tight cropping and unusual perspective create for the viewer. Many of the surrealists were fascinated by how the world looked at close quarters through a camera lens. Brassai and Dali’s Involuntary Sculptures, Dora Maar’s Portrait d’Ubu and Jacques-Andre Boiffard’s Big Toe reflect a more general interest in the capabilities of photography to stare closely at objects until they were transformed from being ordinary into something marvelous. Parallel to this interest was an increase in microphotography and the use of increasingly powerful lenses to capture scenes previously invisible to the human eye.
These images and more are reproduced in the excellent catalogue of the exhibition Close-Up: Proximity and De-Familiarisation in Art, Film and Photography, the cover of which features one of Mike Kelley’s photographs of dust that are a kind of contemporary response to Man Ray’s image above.
