In fact, the timelessness of Surrealism is perhaps
best expressed in Ubac’s photographs that present
the familiar sites of Paris as fossils, printed through
a special technique of sandwiching negatives that
Ubac developed. Published inMinotaurein 1939,
these photographs were part of a group of illustra-
tions accompanying an article about ruins by Ben-
jamin Pe ́ret. Here Paris is not just shown in a future
time when these buildings might fall into ruin, but
frozen in time, as fossils forever immobilized in
rock relief. Ubac uses his unorthodox printing pro-
cess to deny photograph’s defining characteristics:
tonal modulation is severely limited, replication of
visual experience is bypassed, the capture of an
instance of perceived reality is ignored. Instead
these photographs demand a new definition of the
medium by presenting an alternative to our visual
knowledge of the reality of time and space.
Like Ubac, other photographers used unusual
photographic techniques to produce uncanny images.
Foremost among these are Man Ray’s Rayographs,
cameraless photograms featuring unrelated objects
arranged on photographic paper, exposed to light,
then printed. With their seemingly spontaneous
arrangements, Man Ray’s Rayographs come closest
photographically to Breton’s call for automatism in
the creation of works of art. In an essay entitled
‘‘When Objects Dream,’’ published as an introduc-
tion to a collection of Man Ray’s Rayographs, Tris-
tan Tzara captured the appeal of the Rayograph:
Objects to touch, to eat, to devour, to place on the eyes,
on the skin, to squeeze, to lick, to smash, to crush,
objects to belie, to flee, to honor, cold or warm objects,
feminine or masculine, day objects or night objects that
you absorb through your pores the greater part of your
life, which expresses itself unperceived, that courts
because it wasn’t known and that dispenses itself with-
out counting the thousand magnets poised on the edge
of the unanimous route; your slumbers fixed in the but-
terfly box have cut the diamond beneath all the faces of
the earth; in our infancies lost inside us and ineffably
charged with dreams like the geological layers that we
use for bed sheets.
The technique of solarization also appealed to
Surrealist photographers, including Man Ray, Lee
Miller, and Maurice Tabard. By overexposing a
negative or a print during the process of printing,
tones are reversed, causing light halos in the areas
of the print where the reversal has occurred and
dark edges where it has not. The uncanny effects
produced by solarizing an image enabled portrait
and figure studies to enter the realm of Surrealism,
as figures either bleed into the ground or take on
unnatural dark linear edges. Montage was also
favored by Surrealists, who cut and pasted photo-
graphs in unusual combinations before re-photo-
graphing them as unified images.
Other photographers of the 1920s and 1930s who
are associated with Surrealism include Dora Maar,
who worked closely with painter Pablo Picasso,
Umbo, Brassaı ̈, and Raoul Hausmann, whose
work exemplifies the strong links between the
slightly earlier European movement, Dada, and
Surrealism. Members of the Czech avant-garde,
particularly Karel Teige, were influenced by their
French counterparts and eventually joined with
them. Surrealism also had a major impact on fash-
ion photography of the 1930s, as can be seen in the
work of Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean, Erwin Blu-
menfeld, and the American John Rawlings.
Surrealism was a highly organized and tightly
controlled movement, with publications, exhibi-
tions, and aesthetic and political doctrines. With
the outbreak of World War II, a group of Surreal-
ists headed by Breton settled in New York. They
exhibited at the Julien Levy Gallery and Peggy
Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery, where
their work had a profound impact on emerging
Abstract Expressionist artists. While the initial
practitioners of this genre are considered the clas-
sical surrealists and the movement did not survive
its founders, the term is also generally applied to
any photography that displays unreal or dream-Man Ray, Le Violon d’Ingres, 1924, Photograph,
re-worked with pencil and ink.
[CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Re ́union des Muse ́es Nationaux/Art
Resource, New York]SURREALISM