Photography and Surrealism

Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent

David Bate

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000213485
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Art
• Categoria: Art General

David Bate examines automatism and the photographic image, the Surrealist passion for insanity, ambivalent use of Orientalism, use of Sadean philosophy and the effect of fascism of the Surrealists. The book is illustrated wtih a wide range of surrealist photographs.

1 . What is a surrealist photograph?

Do you like photography? You will find photographs to your hearts content at M. Druets gallery.They are lovely and quite accurate reproductions of famous paintings from Leonardo daVinci to Maurice Denis, including works by Titian, Ingres,

Toulouse-Lautrec, and Cézanne.

Guillaume Apollinaire¹

I Guillaume Apollinaire, 'The Art World' (10 January 1911), in Leroy C. Breunig (ed.), Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902—1918, trans. Susan Suleiman (New York: Da Capo, 1988), p. 129.

To start with the question 'what is a surrealist photograph?' might be taken to presuppose that such a thing simply exists and that this chapter sets out to explain, or at least identify, its characteristics! But what is it that defines a 'surrealist' picture? Is it when an image is used within surrealism, or is it in the property of a particular type of image regardless of historical surrealism? Invariably the common assumption is the latter: a surrealist image is a particular sort of picture that is 'recognized' as simply being 'surreal', as a particular type of picture. A consequence of this assumption in the study of surrealism is to disregard other types of photograph within Surrealism, the ones that do not fit a 'surreal' category. In contrast to this thinking, I want to ask what relations between surrealism and photography are established within historical surrealism. What needs to be raised is the issue of whether such a category as'surrealist photograph'has any coherence at all? In this respect, perhaps a better way to put the question is: when is a photograph surrealist? This at least has the virtue of not immediately assuming that any photograph used in surrealism is 'surrealist' and less easily allows a general distinction between surrealism and photography (as different fields ot practice) to be elided. It also throws up the challenge of making distinctions about what types of photographs are used, how they figure and what uses they are put to within surrealism. Since assumptions about the answers to these questions already precede any argument made here, I will immediately state my case.

Sign Systems

I propose that what people name as 'surreal' should be described as a type of meaning, not a type of picture. The surreal is, semiotically speaking, a signifying effect, the confusion or a contradiction in conventional signifier—signified relations in representations and where a meaning is partially hidden, where the message appears 'enigmatic' regardless of how (or in what technological form)² it has been produced.The concept of an enigmatic message within signification processes is borrowed from its use in psychoanalytic theory by Jean Laplanche. He clarifies the meaning of an enigma by comparison with the 'riddle':

2 In this respect what I am arguing might be extended beyond the domain of photography to all other forms of signification used in surrealism.

An enigma, like a riddle, is proposed to the subject by another subject. But the solution of a riddle in theory is completely in the conscious possession of the one who poses it, and thus it is entirely resolved by the answer. An enigma, on the contrary, can only be proposed by someone who does not master the answer, because his message is a compromise-formation in which his unconscious takes part.³

3 Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 254—5, note 46.

In short, the author of an enigmatic message is not fully aware of the signification involved in a message they have Sent. I want to use this concept for discussion of the analysis of surrealist images in surrealism.⁴ But first, there is a need to be able to assess and describe the different types of photograph used within surrealism.

4 It is particularly true of images in surrealism that, in the creative play of the signifier, meanings were produced that were always elusive even for the surrealists. This is not to say that authors are unable to speak about what they intended, nor that they could not say what the picture 'meant' to them.This is not to deny that authors have intentions, but rather that whatever is uttered as its meaning is not all of what is signifying — no 'transcendental signified' to be found in the author's intention, even though an author may give their own 'intended' meanings.

It is quite clear when looking at photographs used in surrealist periodicals, exhibitions and books that the image types are heterogeneous, diverse and mixed: various ordinary and experimental photographs made by surrealists, anonymous found images, postcards, scientific pictures, newspaper cuttings, film stills, portraits and so on. Obviously, in terms of examining a surreal effect, such sociological categories are useless, since they do not describe their use within surrealism. What is required to address the relations of these various types of photograph within surrealism is a framework that acknowledges the differences, but which specifies the attributes and characteristics of their functions and use (including what it is that constitutes a 'surreal' photograph) in terms of their production of'surrealist' meanings. I propose three categories (i.e. types of signifier) of distinction relevant for such a discussion of photographic signifying functions:

1. Mimetic; 2. Prophotographic; 3. Enigmatic. Such distinctions are, of course, provisional and subject to revision. They are in no way meant as a 'new' ontology of the photographic image, despite any neologisms. There are images — and critics — likely to test such categorical distinctions. Despite the possibility of 'deconstructing' them by attending to the 'fringe' areas, with images that might fall across or between them, I will nevertheless maintain them in a provisional working hypothesis, so long as they have a general validity and use. A brief description will help elucidate what is intended by their scope and sense.

1 Man Ray, Centrale Surréaliste (1924). The surrealists photographed at the Bureau of Surrealist Research in 1924: Max Morise, RogerVitrac, Jacques-André Boiffard, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Pierre Naville, Giorgio de Chirico, Philippe Soupault, Simone Colinet-Breton, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Raymond Queneau, Louis Aragon and Marie-Louise Soupault. Used on the front cover of La Révolution surréaliste, no. 1, December 1924.

Mimesis

By a mimetic photograph is meant the totally conventional, 'normal' use of photographs, as an 'illustrative' representation. In mimesis a photographic sign serves as a mimetic reproduction of the referent (the thing depicted or referred to), which is held to be 'reproduced' photographically.This signifying 'naturalism' sees not the picture but only the thing depicted, ignoring the techniques of mediation, perspective, geometry, chemistry, lighting, etc. Within or outside surrealism such mimetic photographs are commonly used to 'reproduce'paintings, people or places where to all intents and purposes, the photograph remains invisible, ideologically 'transparent'. A typical example in surrealism is the top photograph on the front cover of La Révolution surréaliste, no. I (December 1924) by Man Ray (see Figure 1). The group of surrealists (the referent) in this picture (the signifler) are shown as gathered together as in a conventional group portrait of 'the surrealists' (the signified meaning) and the picture (sign) mimics a believable scene (the referent). This is despite the fact that we know from the semiotie study of photographic images that this type of (signifier + signified =) sign, as a 'copy' of the thing represented, is nevertheless produced through a Complex coding of the image.⁵ Roland Barthes is right when he complains in Camera Luada that people generally fail to distinguish a photograph 'from its referent (from what it represents)'.⁶ The photograph, presumed to be essentially 'indexical' as a recording device, an imprint of light on chemicals spread across a base support (film or paper), remains the dominant ontological definition of photography. We readily and easily conflate the picture with the thing represented — the illusion of photographic realism. Although the photograph is commonly defined semiotically as indexical, it is nevertheless wrong to confuse the mimetic verisimilitude of 'realism' with indexicality. Photographic realism of the sort we encounter daily in various types of photographs is predominantly iconic. Indexicality means that a sign is caused by its referent, whereas an iconic sign has relation of resemblance, as in 'copying' the referent (mimesis) in the sense of its appearance.⁷ (An iconic image is a sign that is analogous to aspects of an object [referent] in relation to its appearance in conventional perceptive codes of vision.) Thus visual mimesis is a form of iconic logic caught up in a play of resemblance within the field of perspectival vision more than it is indexical. So, just to make the difference clear, a photogram, for example (an image produced in a darkroom by putting objects into the beam of light directed at photographic paper), is certainly an indexical trace of the objects used to create the shapes in the image,but there is no automatic guarantee of'realism', in that the image produced does not necessarily re-present the objects used to make the image. We need only consider those playful visual illusions in which shadow puppeteers, using their hands in a beam of light, simulate the (iconic) shadow images of various birds, animals or caricatures of individuals. In such images the picturesign conjured up (bird, animal etc.) has no necessary meaningful relation to the human hands (referent), which produced them. Indeed, this conjuring up of an image in shadow puppetry is precisely the same structure (if not the same level of sophistication) as the 'magic'which pervades the photographic illusion of reality.

5 See Umberto Eco, 'A Critique of the Image', in Vict or Bur gin (ed.), Thinking Photography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982) which, along with the editor's essays, remains the best summary of the sustained structuralist inquiry into the semi otic study of photographic images when read in conjunction with Roland Barthes's essay 'Rhetoric of the Image', in Image-Music—Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1980).

6 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Fontana, 1984), p. $.

7 In 'Photography and Fetish' Christian Metz notes,'indexicality, of course, leaves room for symbolic aspects, as the chemical image often looks like the object (Peirce considered photography as an index and an icon)' October, no. 34, Autumn, 198$, p. 82. Charles Sanders Peirce's triadic semi otic definition of the sign as index, icon and symbol is the reference here. For Peirce...