Jindrich Styrsky

Ideas

Ideas i like to look further into...

Surrealist books juxtaposed poetry and photography....incorporating text

Double Exposure

Surrealist photography in general...

Surrealist Photographers

These are all photographers I have researched after reading through the essays I have previously displayed. I like the way they manipulate some of the photographs, especially by the use of over exposure. I think that this could be a technique I could use to explore the theme of my project. I am currently thinking about making ordinary small objects look bigger than they actually are, and maybe by double exposure I could experiment with this idea...

These are images by Frederick Sommer. I like the double exposure and the image of the hands being being than the silhouetes beside it.

This is an image by Manuel Alvarez Bravo.

These are photos by Clarence John Laughlin. I like the use of double exposure here in one of his photos... that could be a good idea to use in order to manipulate photos. to double expose an ordinary small object over something more monumental...

Another Interesting Essay on Surrealist Photography

It may at first seem odd that Surrealism, with its emphasis on the poetry of the unconscious, should have had any interest in the all too physical processes of photography. But the Surrealists were not interested in escaping from reality; rather they sought a deeper, more heightened form of it. If photography could be turned away from the mere depiction of surfaces, its apparent objectivity could be powerfully put to Surrealist ends, producing evidence of this ‘sur-reality’.In fact, photography was found everywhere in Surrealist publications. Magazines such as La Révolution surréaliste (1924-9), Documents (1929-30), and Le Minotaure (1933-9) featured anonymous photographs, often with their meaning crucially changed in this new context, alongside images made by photographers such as Man Ray, Jacques-André Boiffard, and Brassaï. The leader of the Surrealist group, André Breton, used photographs by Boiffard and Brassaï to illustrate the places visited in his two books Nadja (1928) and L'Amour fou (1937). Several Surrealist books juxtaposed poetry and photography. In Facile (1935), Paul Éluard's poems for his wife Nusch were interwoven with Man Ray's photographs of her nude body. Roland Penrose's The Road is Wider than Long (1938) was the product of a journey through the Balkans with Lee Miller, and brought together his photographs and poetry in a shifting page layout. On the Needles of These Days, published in Prague in 1942, juxtaposed photographs of found objects by Jindrich Styrsky (1899-1942) with unrelated fragments of text by Jindrich Heisler.Surrealist photography itself took several forms. There was a great use of techniques of manipulation. Many artists used photomontage—the early work of Max Ernst stands out here—but equally it was pursued by Surrealist writers such as Breton and Éluard. The foremost inventor of Surrealist photography was Man Ray—born in America but living in Paris from 1921. He developed a poetic form of the photogram, which he called the ‘Rayograph’. Later, he explored the technique of solarization with great delicacy, especially in his portraits and nudes. In the 1930s, the Belgian Raoul Ubac mixed solarization with photomontage to make more multi-layered, ‘convulsive’ images.Staged photography was also important for a number of Surrealist artists, often prefiguring its role in later art practice. On one level, this took the form of highly sophisticated snapshots, like the witty, ironic images made by René Magritte and the rest of the Belgian group. More serious and indeed controversial are the photographs that Hans Bellmer took of his ‘Poupée’—the female doll he made in the 1930s. Variously seen as liberatory or misogynistic, the images of the doll twisted this way and that remain deeply disturbing. Recently, the work of two lesser-known figures, Pierre Molinier (1900-76) and Claude Cahun, has been much discussed for the way they crossed gender boundaries, Molinier dressing in corset and black stockings while Cahun often rendered herself neuter, almost alien.Finally, and in quite different ways, the conventions of documentary photography were exploited by Surrealism for its own ends. Among the images used anonymously in La Révolution surréaliste were four photographs by Eugène Atget, made for quite different ends but ‘discovered’ as examples of unconscious Surrealism by Atget's neighbour, Man Ray. Very soon, though, the Surrealists came more broadly to view Atget's deserted cityscapes as images of a haunted urban environment pregnant with possibilities. Brassaï's later photographs of Paris by night can be seen as a nocturnal parallel to Atget's work; he was one of a generation of photographers in Paris in the early 1930s who were influenced by Surrealism. Using the new 35 mm camera, André Kertész and the young Henri Cartier-Bresson pictured a city full of coincidences and connections, caught in a fraction of a second before they disperse.The influences of Surrealism within photography have been far reaching. Simply in this latter area of ‘surrealist documentary’, one would have to go on to consider the work of Bill Brandt and Lee Miller in Britain, Vilém Reichmann (1908-91) and Emila Medková in Czechoslovakia, Manuel Álvarez Bravo in Mexico, Frederick Sommer in the Arizona desert, and Clarence John Laughlin in New Orleans. All these photographers were interested in how the camera can simultaneously record everyday reality and probe beneath its surface to reveal new possibilities of meaning.
— Ian Walker

Photography and Surrealism Thematic Essay

Surrealism was officially launched as a movement with the publication of poet André Breton's first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. The Surrealists did not rely on reasoned analysis or sober calculation; on the contrary, they saw the forces of reason blocking the access routes to the imagination. Their efforts to tap the creative powers of the unconscious set Breton and his companions on a path that carried them through the territory of dreams, intoxication, chance, sexual ecstasy, and madness. The images obtained by such means, whether visual or literary, were prized precisely to the degree that they captured these moments of psychic intensity in provocative forms of unrestrained, convulsive beauty.

Photography came to occupy a central role in Surrealist activity. In the works of Man Ray (2005.100.141) and Maurice Tabard (1987.1100.141), the use of such procedures as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization dramatically evoked the union of dream and reality. Other photographers used techniques such as rotation (1987.1100.49) or distortion (1987.1100.321) to render their images uncanny. Hans Bellmer (1987.1100.15) obsessively photographed the mechanical dolls he fabricated himself, creating strangely sexualized images, while the painter René Magritte (1987.1100.157) used the camera to create photographic equivalents of his paintings. In her close-up photograph of a baby armadillo suspended in formaldehyde, Dora Maar performs a typical Surrealist inversion, making an ugly, or even repulsive subject compelling and bizarrely appealing (2005.100.443).
But the Surrealist understanding of photography turned on more than the medium's facility in fabricating uncanny images. Just as important was another discovery: even the most prosaic photograph, filtered through the prism of Surrealist sensibility, might easily be dislodged from its usual context and irreverently assigned a new role. Anthropological photographs, ordinary snapshots, movie stills, medical and police photographs—all of these appeared in Surrealist journals like La Révolution Surréaliste and Minotaure, radically divorced from their original purposes.

This impulse to uncover latent Surrealist affinities in popular imagery accounts, in part, for the enthusiasm with which Surrealists embraced Eugène Atget's photographs of Paris. Published in La Révolution Surréaliste in 1926 at the suggestion of his neighbor, Man Ray, Atget's images of vanished Paris were understood not as the work of a competent professional or a self-conscious artist but as the spontaneous visions of an urban primitive—the Henri Rousseau of the camera. In Atget's photographs of the deserted streets of old Paris and of shop windows haunted by elegant mannequins, the Surrealists recognized their own vision of the city as a "dream capital," an urban labyrinth of memory and desire.

Department of Photographs, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Google Images: Surrealist photography

These are images I found on google as I started to research into surrealist photography. These images incorporate the aspect of ordinary objects appearing larger than they would in reality, by a trick of the camera.

This is a photo 'Composition', 1929Maurice Tabard

Further Idea

After the crit we had the other day an idea which was brought up which I could further develop was the idea of making ordinary objects (by looking at them from different perspectives) look monumental in comparison to other objects.....

ok, i cannot explain myself very welll.... but i guess the idea I'm trying to get across is to make ordinary objects, like a coffee cup for example, look just as big as a really tall building, or a person. This in turn, gives more importance to the coffee cup.... it would look very surreall, so I hope to research the surrealists maybe and how they treated ordinary objects.

Here is a photo I took anyway which conveys the idea of what I am going for... the coffee cup looks bigger than the man. it was an 'accdental shot' which led me to think of exploring this idea...