Photography and surrealism

The surrealist group posed in a daydream automatic writing seance at the Bureau of Research. Published on the cover of La Rvolution surraliste, no. , : Max Morise, Roger Vitrac, JacquesAndr Boiffard, Andr Breton, Paul Eluard, Pierre Naville, Giorgio de Chirico, Philippe Soupault, Simone CollinetBreton, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron. Photograph by Man Ray (see also Figure ).
12

three completely different photographic images by Man Ray are published (see Figure ). Two of these are photograms produced automatically by the play of light projected on to objects placed directly on to photographic paper. The third is another mimetic-type photograph that depicts sugar cubes on a table, with a pair of hands placed above them as though about to be played like piano keys, or about to be shuffled like the dominoes of a gambler or (more mystically) as the objects moved by the hands of a spiritist. The different techniques used to produce the images demonstrate that photography is subject to the same gamut of images as other visual forms like drawing and painting. The issue common to all these was how to mediate the psychical automatic image produced.When Andr Breton spoke of automatic writing as a veritable photography of thought, he was using photography as an analogy with the process of recording something, as in the conventional belief that photography can capture a moment. If psychic automatism was the vital substance and source of the image appearing in thought by itself, the problem for photography, just as it was for painting, was that it was historically associated and linked with rendering (mimesis) of the exterior world rather than any psychological interior world which the surrealist notion of psychic automatism was intended to draw out. Photographers associated with surrealism like Man Ray
80