1 of 40

Documentary Photography and Surrealism in Interwar Paris: A Dialectical

Resolution

Surrealism aims to reduce, and ultimately to resolve, the contradictions between

sleeping and waking, dream and action, reason and madness, the conscious and the

unconscious, the individual and society, the subjective and the objective. It aims to

free the imagination from the mechanisms of psychic and social repression, so that

the inspiration and exaltation heretofore regarded, as the exclusive domain of poets

and artists will be acknowledged as the common property of all. André Breton

The origin of Surrealism can be traced back to early twentieth century Paris, where it

began as a literary movement. Surrealist writers sought to free the subconscious from any

logical or mediated responses by experimenting with the concept of automatism or automatic

writing. Surrealism achieved its first victories precisely in the realm of poetry. But it was in

1924, with the publication of the Manifeste du Surréalisme by the poet André Breton (1896-

1966), that the Surrealist movement was officially launched. Surrealism would later become an

international current of thought that often instigated both positive and negative intellectual and

political responses.

Surrealists were influenced by psychological theories and dream studies developed by

Sigmund Freud along with political ideologies proposed by Karl Marx in the nineteenth century.

Based on Freudian methods of free association, Surrealist poetry and prose explored the private

world of the mind, traditionally restricted by reason and societal limitations, to produce

surprising, unexpected imagery. André Breton, in his Manifeste du Surréalisme, describes

Surrealism as “the psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express –

verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of

2 of 40

thought.”1 The Surrealist movement also finds its ancestry, as well as its disregard for the

traditional concepts of what art is supposed to be in Dadaism.

Initially, Surrealist writers dismissed the idea that Surrealism could be represented in the

visual arts. They believed that the deliberate and laborious natures of painting, sculpting, and

drawing were in opposition to the spontaneity and uninhibited expression inherent within

Surrealist concepts. Furthermore, the idea of incorporating Surrealism into photography, which

was viewed as merely an effort to copy reality, seemed outrageous. Fascination with its effects,

awareness of its potential to revolutionize the visual arts and distrust of its mimetic nature

summarizes Surrealist attitudes towards photography in earlier texts.

This belief, nonetheless, was changed by Man Ray’s portrait of Marquise Casati, ca.

1922 (figure 1). In this photograph, Man Ray accidentally blurred the subject’s face, thus

creating both a dream-like effect and the illusion that the woman had more than two eyes. A

whole new set of possibilities within photography had just unveiled itself. Even though by

chance, the incident was enough to show that reality could indeed be manipulated through

photography. Man Ray (1890-1976), after all, attempted to make his photography automatic, as

a writer would with a typewriter.2 Consequently, photography’s presumed eccentricity to

Surrealist thought and practice had to be reconsidered.3

In spite of their prolificacy in so many directions, the Surrealists themselves never

published a real manifesto on photography. Their concepts often unfolded “in acts” without any

“apparent” logical linearity, other than the preoccupation of advancing their ideas as they came

into being. Photography, however, pervaded all the group’s activities. What is more,

1 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1969), 26. 2 La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film, exhibition catalogue, 23 September 2009-11 January

2010, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France: 16. 3 Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October 19 (Winter, 1981): 3-34.

3 of 40

photographs were more than mere illustrations; the texts accompanied them as much as they

accompanied the texts in their books, tracts, reviews and periodicals. Photography was often

also collected among them, and even became the inspiration for games.4

Surrealism in photography was hitherto performed mainly by the actual manipulation of

the images through techniques such as photomontage, photogram, multiple exposure,

solarization, and glass negative. As diverse as these techniques may have been, there is one form

that merits further development: the Surrealist, but straight, documentary photography. In

addition, numerous studies have already scrutinized several aspects of the staged and

manipulated photography produced within Surrealism. Little, however, has been explored

surrounding ideas of straight photography. For this reason, my work proposes the Hegelian

reconciliation between such dualisms as the odd and the familiar, the unconscious and the

conscious, the real and the constructed. In summary, this paper endeavors to disassemble the

barriers between “the real” and “the surreal,” ultimately striving towards their dialectical

resolution.

Primarily, this task entails the investigation of photographs published in Surrealist books

and magazines. Underpinning this study is the premise that a single photograph may shift

meaning as it moves from the place where it has been taken to the place where it is published or

viewed. It is therefore assumed that the articulation of the work within the context of its

reception can unveil its Surrealist dimension. For if there is any venue, argued Dawn Ades,

through which the movement can be best studied and its activity better understood, it is that of its

periodicals: “The life of the movement in its fullest sense is to be found […] in the surrealist

periodicals – not as a monolithic expression of surrealism, but as a terrain of debate, of creation,

and criticism. It is also in the periodicals that the range and resources of photography within

4 La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film: 3.

4 of 40

surrealism are most fully realized.”5 Therefore, one must recognize that the documentary aspect

of photography - its association with what is vulgarly understood as reality - within these

publications was constantly being both displayed and challenged.

Secondly, perhaps less factual but equally important, is the exercise of probing into what

the Surrealists, chiefly André Breton, might have said about photography and, when hard

evidence lacks, how one might read an image through Surrealist lenses. This effort proves

especially relevant with works that do not come from within the traditional ideas of the

Surrealist movement itself, but can be placed next to and in juxtaposition with Surrealism.

Nevertheless, if one is to oppose the latter approach, it should suffice to acknowledge that the

Surrealists themselves were “guilty” of re-contextualizing, often by re-titling paintings in order

to suggest alternative [Surreal] readings of the works. As a matter of fact, it is known that de

Chirico complained about the Surrealist habits of changing the titles of his paintings when he

once stated: “it twisted the meaning of his work and set the stage for an ambiguity that is

dangerous for the market.”6 Furthermore, when photographs illustrated in the surrealist

periodicals received captions, these captions were sometimes used in order to alter the

signification of an image.7 For example, on the cover of the sixth issue of La Révolution

surréaliste (March 1926), Man Ray’s dada photograph, Moving Sculpture (figure 2) was titled

“France,” which transformed its flowing white sheets into ghostly shrouds, or into a symbol of

patriotic honor, the national flag – but here represented as drooping, multiplied and amorphous

blank objects. Nonetheless, not all of the photographs found in these magazines were made by

the surrealists themselves or by photographers that the surrealists adopted. Several were simply

5 Dawn Ades, “Photography and the Surrealist text,” in L’Amour Fou: Photography & Surrealism, eds. Rosalind

Krauss and Jane Livingston (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985), 155. 6 M. Guerrisi, La nueva pittura: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, De Chirico, Modigliani (Torino: Dell-Erma,

1932), 64-65. 7 Krauss, L’Amour fou, 159.

5 of 40

collected [by chance] in the streets of Paris, or in junkyards, public markets, and/or popular

scientific publications. In fact, many of those photographs were anonymous. Therefore, any

Surrealist theorization of photography can be fragmentary and elusive, and the reading of it must

be consciously retrospective.

With that in mind, this essay intends to show that Surrealist documentary photography

can subvert the very “straightness” of the medium and its apparent realism in order to create the

surreal. In fact, it claims that this type of documentary photography can be more disruptive of

conventional norms than the contrivances of darkroom manipulation. To forge this argument

and narrow the scope of this research project, I chose to focus on works made and/or published

in Paris in the years between the two World Wars.

In the 1920s and 1930s, this genre of documentary photography largely took place in and

around city settings, where the banal and the extraordinary coexist on a daily basis. Across

Paris, for example, photographers identified several privileged places, especially resonant for

personal or cultural reasons, which had always been an important facet of Surrealism. In his first

collection of essays Les Pas Perdus in 1923, Breton wrote: “The street, which I believed could

furnish my life with its surprising detours; the street, with its cares and its glances, was my true

element: there I could test like nowhere else the winds of possibility.”8 The very site where the

image was made no longer functioned as mere background to a central subject, but also occupied

as important a role as any other element within the composition.

Although this paper is centered on photography, an analysis of Joan Miró’s painting

titled: “Photo: this is the color of my dreams,” dated to 1925 (figure 3) should help foreground

how interlinked photography was – sometimes physically, often conceptually – with other media

8 André Breton, The Lost Steps (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 4.

6 of 40

utilized by Surrealists. Miró’s painting, almost featureless, is composed of three elements: the

word “photo” written in large letters on the upper left, a single patch of blue paint on the right,

and inscribed below it the phrase: “This is the color of my dreams.” Most commentaries on the

painting concentrate on the patch of blue paint. This seems to deny, however, the importance of

the other, equally significant, element in the composition: the large calligraphic word Photo in

the top left corner. This word informs the viewer that this is a reproduction of the color of the

artist’s dreams, which is blue. One could argue that in order to establish the status of his blue as

having the force of truth, Miró calls upon a central element in the power of photography: the

way it records, apparently without commentary, but “precisely” and directly, whatever might be

before the camera.

According to Barbara Rose, nonetheless, this painting is a gesture of resistance to the

increasingly prevalent role of photography within Dadaism and Surrealism. Miró, she argues, is

exposing the imaginative limitations of photography, since dreams, like angels, cannot be

photographed.9 Yet this ignores the way that the transcriptive power of photography can itself

seem magical, despite – indeed because of – its chemical directness. Photography’s very

reliance on chemistry makes it seem alchemical.10

Miró’s evocation of photography as metaphor

for an apparently contrary form of poetic creativity – a documentation that is also magic – finds

echoes elsewhere in Surrealism. Most pointedly, there is the early remark by André Breton:

“The invention of photography dealt a mortal death blow to old means of expression, as much in

painting as in poetry, where automatic writing… is a veritable photography of thought.”11

9 Barbara Rose, Miró in America (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 16. 10 Ian Walker, City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar Paris

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 80. 11 André Breton, The Lost Steps (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 60.

7 of 40

While automatic writing is the direct, unedited, and unmediated workings of the

unconscious, in a photograph, the Surrealist realism must consist of more than mere reproduction

of the surface of reality. It must also try to reveal connections and meanings normally obscured

or overlooked. In photography, the idiosyncrasies of la vie quotidienne can become forever

frozen in time, thus creating a whole host of new possibilities and strange discoveries to both the

photographer and the viewer. Arthur Rimbaud once observed: “the artist is a visionary […] his

task is to render visible and legible whatever lay beneath, or beyond the visual.”12

Perhaps one of

the most eloquently elaborated argument about the automaticity and photography’s capacity to

transform reality was made by André Bazin in 1945: “For the first time an image of the world is

formed automatically […] the logical distinction between what is imaginary and what is real

tends to disappear […] Hence photography ranks high in the order of Surrealist creativity

because it produces an image that is a reality of nature, namely, a hallucination that is also a

fact.”13

For that reason, it is photography’s very nature, due to both its connection and its

disconnection with reality, as well as its mechanical and automatic qualities, that makes it the

perfect Surrealist tool.

Breton, however, was not interested in whether or not photography was considered art.

Instead, he was concerned with challenging photography’s “unmediated” and “unadulterated”

mimesis, and while addressing Man Ray’s work in Surrealism and Painting, he explained that

Man Ray “had applied himself vigorously to the task of stripping it [photography] of its positive

nature, of forcing it to abandon its arrogant air and pretentious claims” of reproducing external

reality “faithfully:”

12 Arthur Rimbaud; quoted in Christian Bouqueret, Introduction to Surrealist Photography (London: Thames &

Hudson, 2007), unpaginated. 13

André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What is Cinema? Vol. I (Berkeley: University of

California, 1967), 13.

8 of 40

The photographic print, considered in isolation, is certainly permeated with an emotive

value that makes it a supremely precious article of exchange (and when will all the books

that are worth anything stop being illustrated with drawings and appear only with

photographs?); nevertheless, despite the fact that it is endowed with a special power of

suggestion, it is not in the final analysis the faithful image that we aim to retain of

something that will soon be gone forever.14

Paradoxically, there were situations in which Breton used photography as a way of

authenticating the “non-fictional” character of his texts. In other words, he found in

photography’s reputation as a medium that records “the real,” the perfect mechanism to anchor

his text in reality. For example, Breton commissioned Jacques-André Boiffard (1902-1961) to

produce some of the photographic illustrations for his book entitled Nadja, published in 1928. In

order to convince his readers that Nadja was a true story, Breton used a series of artifices that

would [as he hoped] distance his text from that of a novel, which included the use of

photographs, the presentation of pages of a diary, and the adoption of a tone of “medical

observation.”15

Therefore, the photographs of the streets, alleyways, monuments, squares, and

cafes of Paris became vital in establishing that the book was not a fictional narrative. Moreover,

by including photographs, Breton could avoid the lengthy divagations of verbal descriptions and

the literary vacuity often associated with nineteenth-century “realist” novels condemned in the

first Manifesto.

Boiffard’s photographs (figures 4 and 5) recorded the place where they happened rather

than what happened in these sites. Taken in deadpan, these photographs had an inherently

distant, withdrawn quality, which allowed the successful replacement of the photographer’s

individual experience for that of someone else, in this case, the writer. Hence, Breton’s

14

Krauss, L’Amour fou, 160. 15

Krauss, L’Amour fou, 161.

9 of 40

dedicatory to Boiffard in a copy of the book: “To Jacques-André Boiffard, to whom I owe the

most beautiful photographs in this book and through whose eyes I have seen the true sites known

by mine.”16

It is for their “banality,” nonetheless, that these photographs have often been

recognized. Michel Beaujour described Nadja as:

The narration of an ethnological expedition toward the interior of a singularly disquieting

town, a haunted Paris that unveils little by little its sorceries, admits its periodic ritual

human sacrifices, proffers its possessed and its mirages, which the camera has been able to

capture and present us as if we were there. However, what we are shown is nothing: not

only have the places defended themselves against the photographer, but those that have

allowed themselves to be captured […] are quite dumb; nothing is suggested in these banal

photographs (voluntary banality, no doubt: had he wished to suggest the marvelous of

these places, Breton would have gone to Man Ray, who made several portraits of Nadja).

These photographs, almost empty of human presence, proceed from a zero-ground of

representation: they never move away from the amateur’s snapshot or the out-of-date

picture postcard […] their banality is less a result of the photographer’s lack of skill than

of his will not to inflect the shot, not to make it say more than the eye of the savant has

taken in.

For Roger Shattuck, however, the strength of Boiffard’s images rested, in fact, in their

“apparent” flatness: “The quotidian takes on an intensity that makes the wan photographs seem

foreboding.”17

For it is in its very banality that Boiffard rendered Paris a site of wander, wonder

and mystery. After all, for the Surrealists, it was in the street where the unexpected could

happen, the chance encounter could take place, and where one could put him or herself in a state

of complete disponibilité, and insofar as one was willing to take the risk, he or she could happen

upon the marvelous. What is more, one must never disregard the fact that their “banality” was

16

Dominique Lecoq, quoted in Georges Bataille et Raymond Quneau, “Jacques-André Boiffard ou l’histoire d’un

oil,”, 1930-40, no. 4 (Clermont-Ferrand: n. pub., 1982), 40. 17

Roger Shattuck, “The Nadja File,” Cahiers Dada Surrealisme, 1 (1966), 55.

10 of 40

Breton’s choice: “I have begun by going back to look at several of the places to which this

narrative happens to lead; I wanted in fact – with some of the people and some of the objects – to

provide a photographic image of them taken at the special angle from which I myself had looked

at them.”18

The “marvelous,” for the surrealists, was often to be revealed rather than created. On the

look out for quirks of fate in everyday life, the photographers sought to encounter it in the most

unexpected places, in the banality and triviality of quotidian life. For André Breton, the real and

the marvelous were “connected vessels” coexisting in tandem and with the potency to reveal

itself in either or both forms at any given time. Per consequence, the relationship between work

of art and document became increasingly blurred. The artists were, in that sense, more like

treasure hunters in search of trouvailles (lucky finds), of absurd coincidences and unlikely

juxtapositions, tirelessly challenging the familiar in order to unearth its “bewildering

strangeness.” According to Jean Cocteau, it lies upon the poet - and dare I add, the photographer

- the responsibility to: “place objects from the visible world, rendered invisible by the eraser of

habit, in an untoward position that strikes the soul and imbues them with tragedy. One therefore

needs to compromise reality, to catch it out, to flood it unexpectedly with light and to make it

reveal what it is hiding.”19

Working in that vein, and perhaps the predecessor to the idea of photography functioning

as both a document of reality and a surrealist object, was French photographer Eugène Atget

(1857-1927). The Surrealists’ interest in Atget coincided with the publication of Louis Aragon’s

Le Paysan de Paris in 1926.20

Since the late nineteenth century, Atget had been systematically

making a [sort of] photographic inventory of an ever-changing Paris with its new urban

18

André Breton. Nadja. (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 153. 19

La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film: 12. 20

La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film: 20.

11 of 40

landscape and ongoing Haussmannisation – the radical rebuilding of the city by Baron

Haussmann. While Atget considered his work as “mere documents,” the Surrealists saw in it the

blossoming of a new “social fantasy,” of an “urban mythology” that aligned perfectly with the

increasingly popular poetry of the city. Consequently, it comes as no surprise that photographs

of window shops, random objects, monuments, and scenes of everyday life began to permeate

[more and more] the pages of surrealist texts, and excited the imagination of such names as

Jacques-André Boiffard, Berenice Abbott and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Atget, however, did not

allow his photographs to be published under his name in La Révolution surréaliste.21

In a photograph taken in the Place de La Bastille in 1912, Atget captured the moment

during which a small crowd gathered to watch the eclipse of the sun (Figure 6). This image

made the cover, and was one of three photographs by Atget published in issue no. 7 of La

Révolution surréaliste. Populating the lower half of the image, the crowd looks up toward the

top left corner of the photograph. The title added by the Surrealists offers the viewer a different

explanation to the event on display: “The Last Conversation.” With its religious innuendo, the

Surrealists wanted to poke fun at Catholicism [and organized religion in general] by showing a

group of ordinary Parisians in a recognizably ordinary part of the city who appeared to be

engaged in some sort of mass hysteria. In addition to that, in the top corner towards which the

crowd looks, Atget’s camera lens created a dark vignette, which one could claim to establish a

cynical metaphor for the eclipsed sun – or “the coming miracle.”22

Again, by simply changing

the title of the image the Surrealists encouraged the viewer to reconsider the apparent “banality”

of the event, which in turn, made the text and the photograph, the real and the surreal fuse into a

single [but ambiguous] discourse; one that was surrealist in its essence.

21

Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979), 17. 22

John Fuller, “Atget and Man Ray in the Context of Surrealism,” Art Journal, 36:2 (1976-77), 130-8. p.132.

12 of 40

Even though these evocations of the city as a site of fantasy and mystery harmonized

perfectly with the Surrealist ideas of the urban, no Surrealist writing about Atget’s work ever

made this connection explicitly. This task was left to an art critic from outside Surrealism,

Waldemar George, who wrote about Atget in a short review of the Salon de l’Escalier in 1928,

and later, as part of a longer text, in the special number of Arts et métiers graphiques in 1930. In

the latter essay, he wrote:

Before the Surrealist painter, Atget understood the potential and meaning of facts

juxtaposed, confronting each other without any logical line to justify their juxtaposition.

A quarter of a century before Louis Aragon, he wrote the Paysan de Paris, while probing,

while clearing away the waste rock, while stripping naked this immanent mystery that has

for a name: banality.23

George, therefore, undoubtedly placed Atget’s in a precise relation with fundamental

Surrealist attitudes; claiming even, that he [Atget] had long been producing surrealist work, even

before the concept of surrealism itself came in to being.

Though in a less focused manner, and subsequent to his death in 1927, two Surrealists

also wrote about Atget: Robert Desnos and Albert Valentin. Both, however, were more

interested in Atget’s image of Paris specifically. For Desnos, Atget had the ability to unleash the

marvelous, otherwise trapped in the complacency of everyday life: “His albums…comprise the

most fantastic dossier of marvels that our eyes can see each day but to which too often they do

not pay attention.”24

Valentin, on the other hand, focused on Atget’s images of the edges of

Paris, with its less frequented suburban neighborhoods where the working-class inhabited. He

often read those as sites of discomfort and threat: “In those dead-end streets in the outlying

neighborhoods, those peripheral districts […] we experience a certain malaise in contemplating

23

Translated by John Szarkowski, in Understandings of Atget, pp. 14-15. 24

Desnos, “Emile Adget”, 435.

13 of 40

the world we discover in the ten thousand plates Atget printed, although it is every inch our

own.”25

This image of an alienated Parisian periphery, a site that caused both estrangement and

fear is found in an earlier image by Atget titled Porte d’Ivry, impasse Massena, 18 and 20

Boulevard Massena, circa 1907-08 (figure 7). On the right side of the photograph, a building,

appearing to house a liquor store, is juxtaposed to a blurred, highly lit left side. The tree in the

middle seems to split the image in two: a sharply rendered, high-contrast right side against an

out-of-focus blown up left. On one end [right], life is only hinted at with an empty table with a

chair, a bucket sitting on the sidewalk and the view through the window of stocked shelves

inside the store. Though apparently more “ghostly” and mysterious, the left portion, demarcated

by the trees, displays a cat in the middle staring eerily at the camera. It is unclear as to whether

anybody lives or works there. There is a sense of imminence and disturbance, a theatre for

violent death and melodrama that Valentin often noted, and considered inherently surrealist, in

Atget’s work.26

For the surrealists, that sense of uneasiness was stimulating.

The Surrealist’s unwrapping of this social fantasy, the disturbance and dislocation of the

commonplace - otherwise imperceptible in the course of everyday life - is most prominently

manifested in the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Even though his work never appeared in any

Surrealist publications, Cartier-Bresson made some of his best early pictures out of the space

between the event and its photograph, between the obvious and the elusive. This would later

coin the idea of the decisive moment, which Christian Bouqueret best described as:

A concept devoid of ‘magic,’ the decisive moment is an extraordinary skill at extrapolating

signs, the visible marks of that which lies behind things, and at perceiving the dislocations

25

Albert Valentin, "Eugène Atget", 20-1. 26

Ibid., 20-1.

14 of 40

and surreptitious anomalies that can dramatically transform an ordinary or even

picturesque scene into something strange and deeply disturbing.27

In 1976, Cartier-Bresson, then at the height of his reputation as one of the most important

and influential documentary photographers, decided to use a quotation from André Breton as the

epigram for an anthology of his pictures: “Actually it’s quite true that he’s not waiting for

anyone since he’s not made an appointment, but the very fact he’s adopting this ultra-receptive

posture means that by this he wants to help chance along, how should I say, to put himself in a

state of grace with chance, so that something might happen, so that someone might drop in.”28

Not only did Cartier-Bresson, through this quotation, emphasize the vital role that Surrealist

notions of chance had in the formation of his work method in the early 1930s, but he also

implied that this influence had underpinned his work ever since.

This influence is apparent in Cartier-Bresson’s La Place de l‘Europe from 1932 (figure

8). In this photograph, Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) captured a man frozen in mid-air as he

jumps over a puddle. The photograph depicts the exact moment in which the subject has his legs

extended as he leaps over the flooded terrain. His image is reflected on the water below. In the

top left corner of the picture, juxtaposed to the figure of the man jumping, a poster of a dancer

almost precisely mimics the man’s action. Similarly, the reflection of the poster appears

mirrored in the water below. The figures are silhouetted against a deserted landscape next to a

railroad. The photograph is unusually dark for Cartier-Bresson, capturing the gloom of a

northern city in the winter. The rhythm between the workman and dancer has a nagging

pointlessness, which Breton found so haunting in the chance juxtapositions of street posters and

reality.29

There is an unsettling quality to this image. The disquieting nature of the photograph

27

Bouqueret, Surrealist Photography, unpaginated. 28 Henri Cartier-Bresson, Henri Cartier-Bresson (New York: Aperture, 1976), unpaginated. 29 André Breton, Nadja (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 129.

15 of 40

lies in its setting, a sort of wasteland of indecisiveness, a terrain vague. The site itself, behind

the railway station, is a site of passage and flux, a place that is also a “non-place.” The

photograph serves no apparent social purpose. Rather, it records a sliver of time and space. It

memorializes and creates an image that can only exist as a photograph, for its surreality rests in

the welding together of the real and the constructed. That man was once there, but now he is a

flat silhouette, dynamic yet forever frozen. His suspension in mid-air is just a function of the

camera’s ability to stop motion. But this does not explain the picture. Indeed, like many of

Cartier-Bresson’s early pictures, its power lies precisely in its refusal of explanation.

On other occasions, this refusal seemed even more deliberate. In Valencia in 1933,

Cartier-Bresson photographed a small boy against a gouged and battered wall (figure 9). The

boy looks up as if in an expression of happiness. One might take it, however, as a representation

of disorientation, or even of mental disturbance. Ben Maddow reported that the boy had thrown

a ball into the air and was waiting for it to come down.30

That, in fact, may have been the

original event, but one which has long since been gone. The ball is a red herring. It is

eliminated from the frame at the crucial instant the image was made. It no longer exists, just as

the man jumping the water will never land. The photographer is not interested in reproduction,

but rather in exploring the ontological gaps in photography, the world that lays out of the shot,

with the suggestion that reality has been interrupted in such a manner that the viewer is

challenged to ponder about what actually happened and what appears to have happened.

Photographically, this may be a decisive moment, but it is hardly one that draws together the

elements of the scene in order to explicate them. In narrative terms, the photograph is rather

inconclusive. Ultimately, the viewer is confronted with an unresolved ambiguity that is

Surrealist to the core.

30 Ben Maddow, Faces (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977), 494.

16 of 40

A comparison between the work of Cartier-Bresson and other photographers working in

Paris around the same timeframe can also help illustrate the idea of Surrealist documentary

photography. One of André Kertész’s (1894-1985) earliest 35mm pictures was taken in 1928 in

the Paris suburb of Meudon (figure 10). This photograph has become one of the key images in a

Surrealist reading of his photography.31

Kertész’s image has some features in common with the

previously seen La Place de l‘Europe by Cartier-Bresson (figure 9). The setting is also some

sort of vague terrain through which a railway line passes. Both photographs capture a fleeting

moment when relationships are formed by the camera that a split second later will have gone.

But beyond that, the pictures are quite different. Rather than the single event on which Cartier-

Bresson’s photograph is centered, the effect of Kertész’s image relies on the relationships

between the man and the train, the man and his package, and the man and the photographer.

Caught in mid-stride, the man heads toward the camera and, by seemingly staring at the

photographer, invites the viewer into the scene. The power of this photograph rests in the

harvesting of time and motion that, even though suspended, is also fleeting; the train will

continue to its destination, and the man will complete his errand. Whereas Cartier-Bresson’s

vision is fragmented and dissociative, Kertész’s photograph appears more complete. In each

case, however, the cityscape and life permeate the imagination of both photographers.

To see works that foreshadow the Surrealist fascination with the urban environment,

nonetheless, one must refer back to paintings made by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978) before

the First World War. Albeit much of de Chirico’s work was rooted in a longing for the classical

past - which opposed the modernist inclinations of Surrealists - it is often possible to transpose

his urban landscapes into modern Paris. In fact, de Chirico himself did so when he named one of

his paintings Gare Montparnasse, The Melancholy of Departure (figure 11).

31 Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Surrealism (Cleveland: New Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1979), 21.

17 of 40

Far in the distance, beyond the hard-lined, solid-colored grandiose of the abstracted

façade, a small black train is belching out smoke as it enters the station. Only two small figures,

their shadows cast on the ground, seem to inhabit an otherwise desolate landscape. They head

toward the station, where the train is soon to arrive. Similar to Kertész’s Meudon (figure 10), de

Chirico stops motion and time and thus presents the viewer with an instant that would otherwise

be forever gone. A sense of expectation, of emptiness emanates from de Chirico’s compositions:

the momentary emptiness is somehow suspended in time, but carrying a sense that in a matter of

seconds that scene will, in all likelihood, produce something irremediable.32

Again, it is what

lies outside the composition, in the subconscious, that makes the image. The once deserted

landscape is about to become populated by those who arrive; the figures in the distance will soon

catch the train, which will invariably continue to its final destination. De Chirico transcends the

banality of urban landscapes and creates, in turn, a world that could be real, but for its polysemy

remains enigmatic; therein lays its surreality.

In Le Surréalisme et la peinture, Breton recognizes in de Chirico’s paintings an effective

cityscape of the imagination, a concept inherently Surrealist.33

“De Chirico’s city was not only a

space to put next to the actual city, but also one to place – palimpsest like – over it, so that the

actual city and the imagined city were fused. Reality was infiltrated by the dream, the present

infiltrated by the past,”34

explained Ian Walker. For Breton, de Chirico represented the force

majeure in the creation of a truly modern mythology, one upon which the perception of time and

space needed to be revisited.

What is more de Chirico’s recurring images of arches reaching deep into infinity

alongside solitary statues projecting their shadows onto the pavement of a deserted square; in the

32

Waldberg, Le Surréalisme, 30. 33

André Breton, Surrealism and Painting (New York: Icon, 1972), 13. 34

Walker, Interwar Paris, 37.

18 of 40

distance, a chiseled tower raising a flag; a tall industrial chimney, red, behind an empty temple; a

clock here and there, and the occasional locomotive appearing in the horizon across the city were

often passionately appropriated by the Surrealist.35

The dual image of the street as a site of mystery and pleasure, threat and invitation, also

found expression in Brassai’s work. Unlike Cartier-Bresson, but similar to many Surrealists,

Brassai (1899-1984) was a nightwalker that meandered about the streets of Paris photographing

the city with its characters at night. His photographs often recorded the darker and more obscure

corners of the city, which, according to Brassai himself: “they [the surrealists] consider them

‘surrealist,’ because they [the photographs] revealed a ghostly, unreal Paris, drowned in the night

and the fog.”36

This relationship between Brassai and Surrealism becomes acutely clear in face

of the numerous times in which his photographs were used in Surrealist-influenced [and

controlled] magazines such as Minotaure, and in André Breton’s book L’Amour fou. As a matter

of fact, Brassai’s work was predominantly featured in six of the first seven issues of Minotaure,

with issue number seven (June 1935) focusing on his night photography. In the latter issue,

Brassai is extended a dominating presence with over seventeen photographs in all.37

A number

of these photographs, however, stood by themselves with little or no explicit relationship with

[Surrealist] texts, except for one, the image of La Tour Saint-Jacques, which is used to illustrate

Breton’s La Nuit du tournesol (figure 12).38

Two years later André Breton would recount one night when he and his soon-to-become

wife, Jacqueline Lamba, wandered the streets of Paris, which would later form the basis for his

book, L’Amour fou. In both the magazine and the book, the texts were illustrated with three of

35

Texte de Patrick Waldberg, “L’Étoile du Berger,” dans Le Surréalisme. (Geneve: Skire, 1962), 30. 36

Brassai, “Interview avec France Bequette,” Culture et communication, 27 (1978), 15. 37

Walker, Interwar Paris, 145. 38

Minotaure, 7 (June 1935), 48-55.

19 of 40

Brassai’s nocturnal photographs of the sites the couple had passed by that night: Les Halles, the

Tour Saint-Jacques, and the flower market. Apparently, Breton would later claim to have asked

Brassai to photograph these sites, but as Brassai later rebuffed: “Contrary to what the author of

Nadja thought at the time, however, these photographs had not been made specially for him. I

had had them for some time – even one of the Tour Saint-Jacques as he had described it,

‘beneath its ghostly veil of scaffolding’.”39

The fact that Brassai uses an appositive device, “the author of Nadja,” to refer to Breton

acknowledges both that he was aware of Jacques-André Boiffard’s photographs illustrated in

Nadja, and that his [Brassai’s images] were, perhaps, in direct competition with those of

Boiffard. It should, however, suffice to emphasize that while Breton commissioned Boiffard to

make photographs specifically for his book, Brassai’s were the result of an independent work

concerned with the artist’s own aesthetic and content considerations. Furthermore, the tone of

the aforementioned comment also suggests a tension between Brassai’s desire to separate and

claim complete creative authorship over his oeuvre independently of the use Breton made of it.

Often embedded in the Surrealist discourse and aesthetic sensibility, and certainly found

in Breton’s discussions about Surrealism, was the congruence between nature and art for its

power to produce a sensation that was intrinsically erotic:

I acknowledge without the least embarrassment my profound insensibility in the

presence of natural spectacles and works of art that do not immediately produce in me a

state of physical disturbance characterized by the sensation of a wind brushing across

my forehead and capable of causing a veritable shiver. I have never been able to resist

39

Brassai, Picasso and Company, Conversations with Picasso, trans. Jane May Todd (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1999), 38.

20 of 40

relating this sensation to erotic pleasure, and can discover between them differences

only of degree.40

Breton’s remark not only places nature and art at the same level, but confides that both

can elicit a sensation that he compares with erotic pleasure [arousal]. As a matter of fact, it is no

secret that eroticism was a mechanism through which Surrealism often manifested itself:

“Beauty will be convulsive or not […] convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed-explosive,

magic-circumstantial or not.”41

The “erotic” was often hinted at, or sometimes very openly rendered in Brassai’s work.

In a photograph entitled Brothel dated to 1933 (figure 12), a mirror is placed in the corner of a

space - in this case the room of a brothel – showing the occupants of that room. The mirrors are

framed by the rectilinear shape of the armoire, which is outlined by the geometric patterns of the

wallpaper. In front of it, a man, dressing, stands looking into the mirror on one of its doors,

while his partner’s naked body is captured in a virtual image that is framed by the mirror on the

other door. Present only in reflection, the woman is displaced from her position in real space

and transported to a relation of direct spatial contiguity with her client. In the meeting that is

enacted on the picture plane alone, the couple produces a transient, fleeting sign of the meaning

of their encounter, its anonymous sex represented by their faceless juxtaposition in the mirrors,

by the closure of two bodies back to back in real space. Rosalind Krauss in her article

Nightwalkers explained that Brassai often used the technique of mise en abyme, the placement

within one representation of another representation that reduplicates the first.42

The corner of the room fills the entire frame of the photograph; the frame of the armoire

contains the image of the couple; the frame of the mirror on the left side contains the image of

40

André Breton, “La Beaute sera convulsive,” Minotaure, no. 5, 1934; trans., David Gascoyne, in André Breton,

What is Surrealism? (New York: Monad Press, 1978), 160. 41

Ibid., 42. 42 Rosalind Krauss, “Nightwalkers,” Art Bulletin 41, no. 1 (Spring, 1981): 37.

21 of 40

the woman. But one can also read it from inside out, so that the obvious virtuality of what is

present only in the mirrored space spreads outward to include and encompass the imaged world

on the other side of the mirror and finally the photograph as a whole. The viewer is forced to

acknowledge that the virtuality of the figures seen in reflection is no greater, or less, than the

virtuality of the real figures seen in the direct representational field of the photograph.

According to Christian Bouqueret: “Brassai exposes the reality that has been stripped of its

familiar masks, and allows us a glimpse of connections, gaps, faults – a great network which is

normally unseen and which constitutes precisely what Breton had despairingly hoped for in the

photographs that illustrated his novel Nadja.”43

It is because of this process of transformation of

the real into a field of representations that one might come to read the very bodies of these actors

as symbols, as a surreal depiction of a suspended reality. A reality that Brassai himself came to

qualify as the most surreal: “Yet the surrealism of my images was none other than reality

rendered fantastic through vision. I was only attempting to convey reality, for nothing is more

surreal.”44

In many cases, nonetheless, one must look outside Surrealism itself to fully comprehend

the cultural placement of Brassai’s oeuvre. It is, in this respect, especially relevant to look at

Brassai’s photographs in opposition to, and/or in connection with, the work that Atget was

producing decades earlier. When they first appeared in Minotaure in the early 1930s, Brassai’s

images seemed to have been read as a form of response to Atget’s images: Brassai’s

contemporary Paris set against Atget’s antiquated image, and the dark shadows of night rendered

by Brassai opposed to the clarity of early morning daylight of Atget’s. As a matter of fact, Pierre

MacOrlan once acknowledged this dualism in his text on Atget: “Photographic views of Paris

43

Bouqueret, Surrealist Photography, unpaginated. 44

La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film: 18.

22 of 40

offer two different worlds: that of the day and that of the night. It is easier to exploit the night if

you want to stir the public’s curiosity. The elements of night are the great stage directors of a

social fantastic which is rather naïve and always easy to understand.”45

Even though it is

obvious that a relationship can be established between MacOrlan’s “social fantastic” and the

surrealist ideas presented in Nadja and Le paysan de Paris, these visions were very different in

the end. While the Surrealist dream-image in these books is hard and lucid, Brassai’s dark,

foggy Paris has the softness of a reverie. Whereas the latter brought the mysterious into his

imagery, the former aimed to unveil the marvelous. Surrealism is manifested in both modes

nonetheless.

Whereas Brassai and Kertész came into contact with Surrealism when they were already

well established, Cartier-Bresson discovered it before he began to make photographs and,

therefore, the influence was much deeper. Unlike Atget, Brassai and Kertész, Cartier-Bresson

was happy to acknowledge the importance of that influence. Indeed, his adherence to the

fundamental principles of Surrealism were such that “there is justification for the opinion that in

the early 1930s Cartier-Bresson was the best and most mature of the Surrealist photographers,

although his work does not appear in any of the Surrealist periodicals.”46

Therefore,

understanding Cartier-Bresson’s early works becomes crucial to fully comprehending the

concept of Surrealist documentary photography, even as it was peripheral to the Surrealist

movement itself.

There are enough internal clues to suggest that even though the questions raised here

were not consciously theorized by the Surrealists at the time, they were intuitively embedded in

45

Pierre MacOrlan, “Preface to Atget Photographe de Paris”, in Christopher Phillips (ed.), Photography in the

Modern Era (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), 47. 46

Van Deren Coke and Diana C. Dupont, Photography: A Facet of Modernism (San Francisco: Museum of Art,

1986), 76.

23 of 40

the ways that pictures were made and the ways they were used. If there is a common

denominator to these photographs, then it is that they betray willingness on the part of the

photographer to record the visible, rather than a desire to modify or subvert it. Insistence on

dreaming was never meant to separate the surreal from the real, to relegate the former to a zone

where imaginative activity might be kept safely remote from the world of observed reality.

“What is admirable about the fantastic is that there is no longer anything fantastic: there is only

real,” 47

Breton once observed. Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the Surrealists favored

photography as the medium for its experiments. After all, Breton wanted a tale that would be

more realistic than a novel.

There is no denying that any reading of these photographs must involve a lesser or

greater degree of construction, for there may be a lack of closure in many images that allows for

a multiplicity of readings. The view of this mode of photography should, however, by now be

reconsidered, and thus become a more comprehensive one. To think of those photographs as

“simply documents,” is to deny their power of suggestion, and to ignore the context under which

they were made and/or presented; it is a refusal to the Surrealist invitation to look behind the

curtain, underneath the surface where the marvelous and the surreal may reside. The Surrealists,

ultimately, did not seek an eradication of “realism” but a more complex understanding of it.48

There are also many lessons here for the photographic contemporary practice: lessons

about how the documentary genre can incorporate subjectivity, ambiguity and reflexivity; and

about how images can be made which acknowledge both their constructed and indexical qualities

– images that can be expressions of both desire and fragments from the real world. This work

should also elicit more global questions that even though escaped the purview of this project, still

47

André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of

Michigan Press, 1969), 4. 48

Walker, Interwar Paris, 153.

24 of 40

remain entitled to further consideration. One must now, therefore, revisit and perhaps even

reconsider the role of the camera, chance, intuition, agency and authorship not only in

Surrealism, but also in photography as a medium, a process and an art form.

25 of 40

Figure 1. Man Ray, American (1890-1976). Marquise Casati, 1922. silver gelatin print.

26 of 40

Figure 2. Man Ray, American (1890-1976). Moving Sculpture, 1920. silver gelatin print.

27 of 40

Figure 3. Joan Miró, Spanish (1893-1983). Photo: this is the color of my dreams. 1925.

28 of 40

Figure 4. Jacques-André Boiffard, My point of departure will be the Hotel des Grands

Hommes… (from Nadja), 1928.

29 of 40

Figure 5. Jacques-André Boiffard, The words BOIS-CHARBONS (from Nadja), 1928.

30 of 40

Figure 6. Eugène Atget, The Eclipse (published on the cover of La Révolution surrealiste issue

no. 7), 1912.

31 of 40

Figure 7. Eugène Atget, Porte d’Ivry, impasse Massena, 18 and 20 Boulevard Massena, c. 1907-

1908.

32 of 40

Figure 8. Henri Cartier-Bresson, French (1908-2004). La Place de l’Europe, Paris 1932, Silver

gelatin print.

33 of 40

Figure 9. Henri Cartier-Bresson, French (1908-2004). Valencia, 1933, Silver gelatin print.

34 of 40

Figure 10. André Kertész, Hungarian (1894-1985). Meudon, 1928, Silver gelatin print.

35 of 40

Figure 11. Giorgio de Chirico, Italian (1888-1978). Gare Monteparnasse (The Melancholy of

Departure), 1914. Oil on canvas, 55.1 x 112 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

36 of 40

Figure 12. Extract from André Breton, “La Nuit du tournesol,” with photograph by Brassai, La

tour Saint-Jacques, in Minotaure, 7 (1935). Photograph © Estate Brassai.

37 of 40

Figure 13. Brassai, Hungarian (1899-1984). Brothel, 1933, Silver gelatin print.

38 of 40

Bibliography

Ades, Dawn. “Photography and the Surrealist text,” in L’Amour Fou: Photography &

Surrealism, eds. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, New York: Abbeville Press, 1985.

Ades, Dawn. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978).

Aragon, Louis. Paris Peasant. Trans. Simon Watson Taylor. Boston: Exact Change, 1994.

Arrouye, Jean, “La photographie dans Nadja,” Melusine 4 (1981), 123-51.

Atget, Eugène. Atget: Photographe de Paris, text by Pierre MacOrlan (Paris: Henri

Jonquieres/New York: E. Weyhe Gallery, 1930).

Balakian, Anna. André Breton: Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford University Press,

1971).

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New

York: Hill and Wang, 1980.

Bazin, André, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema? Vol. I (Berkeley:

University of California, 1967).

Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth, ed. Michael Richardson (London: Verson, 1994).

Beaujour, Michel. “Qu’est-ce que Nadja?,” Nouvelle Revu Francaise, 15:172 (April 1967), 780-

99.

Beaumont-Maillet, Laure. Atget’s Paris (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).

Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations

(London: Fontana, 1973): 219-53.

Benjamin, Walter. “Surrealism, the Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” in One-Way

Street (London: New Left Books, 1979): 225-39.

Bonnet, Marguerite, André Breton et la naissance de l’aventure surréaliste (Paris: José Corti,

1975).

Bouqueret, Christian. Introduction to Surrealist Photography. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.

Brassai, Brassai (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1963).

Brassai, Paris de nuit (Paris: Arts et métiers graphiques, 1932).

Brassai, The Secret Paris of the 30s (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976).

39 of 40

Brassai, Picasso and Company, Conversations with Picasso, trans. Jane May Todd (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1999).

Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard and Hellen R. Lane. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press, 1969.

Breton, André. Nadja. New York: Grove Press, 1960.

Breton, André. Surrealism and Painting. New York: Icon, 1972.

Breton, André. The Lost Steps. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

Breton, André. What is Surrealism? Selected Writings. Ed. Franklin Rosemont. New York:

Pathfinder, 1978.

Breton, André. L’Amour fou (Paris: Gallimard, 1937).

Breton, André. Ouvres Complètes, Vol. I, ed. Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 1988).

Breton, André. Les Vases communicants (Paris: Gallimard, 1932).

Buckland, Gail. Reality Recorded: Early Documentary Photography. Greenwich: New York

Graphic Society, 1974.

Cartier-Bresson, Henri. Henri Cartier-Bresson. New York: Aperture, 1976.

Deren C., Van, and Diana C. Dupont. Photography: A Facet of Modernism. San Francisco:

Museum of Art, 1986.

De Sanna, Jole. “Giorgio de Chirico – André Breton: Duel à mort.” Metafisica, no. 1-2 (2002):

62-87.

Fuller, John, “Atget and Man Ray in the Context of Surrealism,” Art Journal, 36:2 (1976-77):

130-8.

Guerrisi, M. La nueva pittura: Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, De Chirico, Modigliani.

Torino: Dell-Erma, 1932.

Grindon, Gavin. “Surrealism, Dada, and the Refusal of Work: Autonomy, Activism, and Social

Participation in the Radical Avant-Garde.” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 34, no. 1 (2011): 79-

96.

Hall-Duncan, Nancy. Photographic Surrealism. Cleveland: New Gallery of Contemporary Art,

1979.

Hammond, Paul. The Shadow and its Shadow. London: British Film Institute, 1978.

40 of 40

Hill, Paul, and Thomas Cooper, Dialogue with Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and

Giroux, 1979).

Hollier, Denis, and Rosalind Krauss. “Surrealist Precipitates: Shadows Don’t Cast Shadows.”

October, Vol. 69 (Summer, 1994): 110-132.

Hubert R., Renée. “The Fabulous Fiction of Two Surrealist Artists: Giorgio de Chirico and Max

Ernst.” New Literary History, Vol. 4, no. 1 (Autumn, 1972): 151-166.

Hugnet, Georges, and Margaret Scolari. “In The Light of Surrealism.” The Bulletin of the

Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 4, no. 2/3 (1936): 19-32.

Krauss, Rosalind. “Night Walkers.” Art Bulletin, Vol. 41, no. 1 (Spring, 1981): 33-38.

Krauss, Rosalind. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” October, Vol. 19 (2005): 3-34.

Krauss, Rosalind. Under Blue Cup. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2011.

La Subversion des images: surrealisme, photographie, film, exhibition catalogue, 23 September

2009-11 January 2010, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France.

MacOrlan, Pierre, “Preface to Atget Photographe de Paris”, in Christopher Phillips (ed.),

Photography in the Modern Era (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989).

Maddow, Ben. Faces. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977.

Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Howard. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1995.

Olin, Margaret. “Roland Barthes’s ‘Mistaken’ Identification.” Representations, vol. 80, no. 1

(Fall 2002): 99-118.

Rose, Barbara. Miró in America. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982.

Shattuck, Roger, “The Nadja File,” Cahiers Dada Surrealisme, 1 (1966).

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 1977.

Walker, Ian. City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in Interwar

Paris. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002.

Walker, Ian. So exotic, So Homemade: Surrealism, Englishness and Documentary Photography.

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.