“Strange shapes, floating body parts and bizarre landscapes: the Surrealists sought to challenge notions of normality through the power of photography.“
Surrealism began in the wake of the First World War, when the horror and violence experienced by so many had shifted perceptions of sanity and reality. The movement was immortalised by the French writer André Breton, who published the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924. This rejected rational ways of seeing the world, looking instead to dreams and the imagination for inspiration. Breton believed that creativity had been weighed down by the drudgery of the day-to-day and sought to release the subconscious power of the dream-like state. Surrealism embraced the absurd, the unconventional, and the shocking.
Surrealist principles presented an exciting challenge for photographers – while a painter can pluck from their imagination with brush and paint, a photograph is derived from the real, material world. Using a variety of processes and techniques such as photomontage (combining diverse photographic images to produce a new work), solarisation (exposing a partially developed photograph to light), and photograms (a cameraless photographic technique), photography soon emerged as a powerful medium for demonstrating Surrealist ideology.
Photographs of a photo-collage taken from the book Aveux non Avenus, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, taken from a collage made 1930, printed 2004. Museum nos. E.714-2005, E.716-2005. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Surrealism was officially launched as a movement with the publication of poet André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. The Surrealists did not rely on reasoned analysis or sober calculation; on the contrary, they saw the forces of reason blocking the access routes to the imagination. Their efforts to tap the creative powers of the unconscious set Breton and his companions on a path that carried them through the territory of dreams, intoxication, chance, sexual ecstasy, and madness. The images obtained by such means, whether visual or literary, were prized precisely to the degree that they captured these moments of psychic intensity in provocative forms of unrestrained, convulsive beauty.
surrealism is meant to show a reality that doesn’t exist, surrealism can be categorised characterized by three main themes: dreams, the unconscious, and the irrational. Surrealism is something that cant be reached, it’s not real, its an idea of something. For example loads of photographers will put multiple things together to show how surreal things really are, it shows a fake reality. They tend to put unrelated objects and events combined in a matter-of-fact way, often in a strange, confusing space. It is stated to make something look surreal, it’s best to add something uncanny to your photographs for example this would be something seeming to have a supernatural character or origin : eerie, mysterious, its something unusual and different to everyday reality. Most of the time when u rely on something uncanny, it suggests you mean that it is strange and difficult to explain, it’s a feeling of being stuck and almost traumatised by what you are seeing. Its a strange and anxious feeling sometimes created by familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts. It shows something that your not used to.
The way to identify surrealism in photography would most likely be how the photograph is presented, and what it is symbolising. Most photographs taken to represent surrealism show double exposure, a combination of printing, montage and a solarisation plus a dramatically evoked union of dreams and reality, what is real and not. Photographers also add rotation, distortion or render their images to become uncanny. There is also a juxtaposition which can be showed by the positioning two or more things placed side by side or close together. This helps to make the ordinary into the extraordinary.
In photography, solarization is the effect of tone reversal observed in cases of extreme overexposure of the photographic film in the camera. Most likely, the effect was first observed in scenery photographs including the sun. The sun, instead of being the whitest spot in the image, turned black or grey.
Looking at some photographs related to surrealism, most photos have some of eye looking at the audience. Artists and photographers feel the need to paint or edit eyes into their work to help create a sense of mystery, depth, and psychological exploration. Eyes are meant to make you feel uneasy and unsettle, the feeling that someone is watching you, a mysterious person you don’t personally know. Looking at this concept I came across “In Magritte’s painting, The False Mirror, a huge human eye completely covers the canvas.”
This was produced by the artist René Magritte, known for creating oil painting, the main purpose of the image is to jolt the viewers by removing the eye from its usual context, presenting it without the face to which it belongs to. It further disrupts expectation by placing a circular sky inside the otherwise ordinary oculus. Sometimes called “magical realism,” such juxtaposition of normally unrelated objects within a seemingly incongruous context is characteristic of much of Magritte’s oeuvre. Magritte stated that adding these unusual concepts helped to identify the unconscious mind. Many other artists after found that using the eye could be effective as a motif in their art. In their works, as in Magritte’s, eyes undermine our basic assumptions—they are recontextualized, multiplied, and assaulted; on occasion, they cry glass tears. The Surrealists meant these kinds of images to make viewers uneasy, to unsettle complacent attitudes about art and life.
Andre Breton:
Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of the World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. Its intention was, according to leader Andre Breton, to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality into an absolute reality, a super-reality”, or surreality. The term “Surrealism” originated with Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917. However, the Surrealist movement was not officially established until after October 1924, when the Surrealist Manifesto published by French poet and critic André Breton succeeded in claiming the term for his group.
The word surrealism was first coined in March 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire. He wrote in a letter to Paul Dermee : “All things considered, I think in fact it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used”
By October 1924, two rival Surrealist groups had formed to publish a Surrealist Manifesto. Each claimed to be successors of a revolution launched by Apollinaire. As they developed their philosophy, they believed that Surrealism would advocate the idea that ordinary and depictive expressions are vital and important, but that the sense of their arrangement must be open to the full range of imagination.
To me surrealism is the idea that fake things and real things are put together. Certain things wont happen in real life and surrealism helps to create a wider imagination. surrealism represents things that are uncanny and unnatural. It shows a whole different representation of the world. The reality of the world shows very strict rules that people need to follow, and surrealism tries to turn things around, make things unpredictable. Everyone has a different opinion on surrealism due to the idea that everyone is different, each person has a different mind set and focus on different things, we all have different dreams that we want to achieve. Each person is unique due to their upbringing. This ties in with the word sonder which is the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. Each person has different problems and surrealism can be a way of showing it. Although I have looked at eyes before and the eye represent a mysterious person looking at you, it could also represent someone’s anxiety that they are struggling from, they feel watched by everyone and anyone and it’s a constant fear that it shuts them of reality, and surrealism helps to represent that each person has different fears and ideas and each should be accepted to an extent. surrealism is a way of expressing thoughts and feelings, especially to those who don’t feel comfortable expressing out loud. It aims to revolutionise human experiences. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams. The movement’s artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional.
Websites used in my work:
Victoria and Albert Museum. (2019). Surrealist photography · V&A. [online] Available at: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/surrealist-photography?srsltid=AfmBOor3anT3QskTD-yjH6YLfI_CLrWMamtD7ZJujaZlYkt4SgdrTdEj [Accessed 12 Feb. 2025].
Department of Photographs (2004). Photography and Surrealism – The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [online] Metmuseum.org. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/photography-and-surrealism.
Annenberg Learner. (n.d.). Art: The False Mirror. [online] Available at: https://www.learner.org/series/art-through-time-a-global-view/dreams-and-visions/the-false-mirror/.
Wikipedia Contributors (2019). André Breton. [online] Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Breton
Wikipedia Contributors (2019). Surrealism. [online] Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrealism