38

Photography and surrealism

39

What is a surrealist photograph?

time. In the Manifesto Breton writes: I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak.35

Louis Aragon also writes near the end of his book Paris Peasant,

Reality is the apparent absence of contradiction.The marvellous is the eruption of contradiction within

the real.36

Thus a fusion of dream and life, reality and fantasy or breaching of the distinctions between them becomes the eruption of contradiction and what delighted the surrealists was the disturbance created by the beauty of marvellous images.

The problem with any modern notion of the marvel-lous is that it is now usually dened within the eld of literary theory as a specic genre of fantasy, distinguish-able in Tzvetan Todorovs tripartite distinctions of the uncanny, the fantastic and the marvellous.37 Among the genres of fantasy literature, the marvellous is the genre of the supernatural, whereas the key condition for the fantastic, according to Todorov, is a text which induces the reader to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described.38 Todorovs theories try to show how the fantastic is produced in literary narratives, but since photographs, as single images, con-stitute non-narrative units, the narrative (syntactic) aspect of his arguments have to be modied in order to be used for visual images.39 Although photographic narrative is a phrase often heard in discussions about photography there is no narrative or narration in a single still picture. Any so-called story in a single picture is the product of a spectators active interpretation often aided or led by a caption or text in which the picture has sparked the memory of an already read story.

In surrealism, the marvellous was not specic to any form or medium, although it was obviously rst formulated in relation to the poetic image in literary practices. The marvellous remained a constant term used throughout surrealism, while the means of achieving it shifted, from automatic writing and its variants in drawing and painting, through to photography, lm and

Breton, Manifestos of Surreal-ism, p. .

Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (London: Pan Books, ), p. . The book was written and pub-lished in instalments between and the quoted passage is from the last part.

See Todorov, The Fantastic, and Rosemary Jacksons Psycho-analytical Perspectives chapter in her Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, ).

Todorov, The Fantastic, p. . In Todorovs account distinctions between these categories are usually decided in the narrative resolution or closure of the text, e.g. it was only a dream. The Sandman story by E. T. A. Hoff-mann and cited by Freud in his The Uncanny is one such example where uncertainty is not resolved.

There is obviously a differ-ence here between the status of the signier in lm and literature as temporal in their very constitu-tion and drawing, painting and photography as spatial. See Peter Wollens Fire and Ice essay, in J. X. Berger and Olivier Richon (eds), Other than Itself (Manches-ter: Cornerhouse, ).