Surrealism

Surrealism is a movement of art that allows artists to use their imagination to create something unusual. Surreal photography represents ideas, emotions and dreams that people have which influences them. It is the idea of creating the impossible and blending reality with the imagination.

The surrealism movement first began in 1924, founded by a French poet, Andre Breton. He explored the irrational mind and soon this was expressed through visual art to explore dream-like and bizarre thoughts and imaginations. surrealism started as art until photographers were son inspired by the principles of the movement and started to create their own work based on painters such as Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte. In the 1920’s and the 1930’s, surrealist photographers started to experiment with different techniques to create these unusual images. Techniques such as:

Double exposure, where two or more images were used on the same frame which resulted in a blend of the two or more realities. The manipulation of a photograph was also used, where the photographer would play around with the final print of an image to create unusual effects and compositions. Montages were also an extremely popular technique where photographers would cut and stick different images in which had no correspondence together.#

In 1940’s to the 1960’s during world war 2, surrealism became more broad with different ways of it being viewed or portrayed. Artists also started using technology and different techniques to create their surrealism work which led to the movement being used in fashion and the production of commercials and films.