Class Excerise C

My task is to write a short reflection on “What is surrealism and its relationship to photography?” after watching and listening to the podcast on ‘brief history of photography (Part 2)’ by Jeff Curto.

Surrealism is born out of the Bauhaus design theory of form follows function. It is another form of art picked up after the Dada movement, which flourished in Europe between World War I and World War II. Surrealism began with the ‘Surrealism Manifesto’ that was drawn up by Andre Breton and published in ‘La Révolution Surréaliste’ in 1924. Surrealism used many of the techniques of Dada but it emphasized the positive rather than the negative. Surrealism aims to combine the conscious and the unconscious, the world of dreams and fantasy along with reality so that the line between these ideas was completely blurred. Many artists during this period believed that the unconscious was where the true centre of art lay, and that artists could tap into this genius by blending and softening the lines between what one's eyes see and the dream world (A Lifetime of Color, 2007).

Jeff Curto also agrees that surrealism is art born completely out of the concepts of the subconscious mind. He further described it as a visual embodiment of a wet dream featuring a baby falling out of a crib. According to him, surrealism makes no logical sense nor does it forms reality. However, he believes that the bits and pieces of pictures and information do have a message to convey.

Besides this, most surrealistic art portrays alternate realities; some created by accident, some using the unconventional realities of blind feeling and impulse. Some of the art of this time is quite cruel and violent as well as very beautiful. The surrealistic artists, like the Dada artists before them, wanted to shock their viewers with the unexpected and make people think in new ways (A Lifetime of Color, 2007).

Surrealistic artists from Japan believes that surrealism was not merely a method of expressing an unreal world that can only exist in the imagination; it was a way of capturing the powerful truth that exists in reality and was therefore linked to reality. Since photography is used to capture the moments in reality, surely, it can be said to be the medium with the greatest potential to achieve the philosophy of surrealism (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2008).

In addition, surrealistic artists use a lot of photos to illustrate the ideas behind the photographic subjects or images. The surrealists choose their subjects carefully to illustrate what he is doing in a dream world. Hence, a surrealist is adept at making a dream world out of a real world by using numerous photographs taken from different scenes and angles.


References

A Lifetime of Color (2007). Retrieved on October 6, 2009 from http://www.alifetimeofcolor.com/study/g_surrealism.html

Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2008). Retrieved on October 6, 2009 from http://www.syabi.com/press/surrealism_eng.pdf