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Photography and surrealism

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What is a surrealist photograph?

end, the surrealists put themselves alongside her in the image. They share with her a wish for the fullment of wishes, yet nevertheless ask themselves, as much as anyone else, the interrogative question: ‘Is suicide a solution?’8 Such a discussion of the montage is far from nished or closed: as Freud had noted, a dream analysis is not easily exhausted. Indeed, perhaps the lack of closure in interpretation of surrealist images and texts is what partly accounts for the continued historical interest in surrealism; the resistance of the images to analysis can itself be fascinating.

TreatmentA surrealist image names enigmas, but by itself the

enigma cannot be fathomed. The paths of historical association can lead us closer to reconstructing the issues. For the immediate question ‘what is a surrealist photograph?’ there can be no simple aesthetic denition. The photographic image and its meanings in surrealism are framed by its cultural ‘date-stamp’ as much as its relation to the three categories of use of image outlined earlier in this chapter, mimetic, prophotographic and enigmatic. Any of these sign types can be mobilized to produce uncanny feelings or strange effects in an image, attributes which are unquestionably what tend to characterize, no matter how feebly, a particular response to surrealist pictures.82 For an understanding of the uses of photography in surrealism it is important not to unify the three types of photograph. Attempts to give an ontological or ‘aesthetic’ denition of photography in surrealism inevitably exclude certain types and functions of photographs from the corpus. In short, then, the three modes of photograph lend themselves to the sur-realist project because surrealism is to be dened as a mode of treating signs by introducing an ambivalence between material reality and psychical reality. To invoke a primal or original fantasy, surrealism was not dependent upon any particular form or type of sign, but through signs paid attention to the very foundation of our being, turning, changing so-called objective signs into signications of subjective states, ‘inventing’ a theory for their translation from the psyche to a material repres-entative via the automatic image.

Suicide was topical. That same year the Belgian review Le Disque Vert (no. , ) ran a special issue on suicide and included contributions from surrealists.

Outside surrealism the type of image that is commonly referred to as a ‘surreal’ picture is predominantly of the prophoto-graphic or enigmatic categories.