In 1924, Andre Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto" created a deep chasm between conventional reality and the surreality that the literary and artistic movement Surrealism promoted. Throughout the 1920s and '30s, Breton and his Surrealist cohorts defiantly examined the subconscious through fantastic and... [more]

In 1924, Andre Breton's "Surrealist Manifesto" created a deep chasm between conventional reality and the surreality that the literary and artistic movement Surrealism promoted. Throughout the 1920s and '30s, Breton and his Surrealist cohorts defiantly examined the subconscious through fantastic and irrational images. Surrealist photography specifically turned the world of photographic perception upside down. Instead of recognizing the camera as a tool of vision and the photograph as an image of truth, the Surrealists utilized the camera as a tool of the imagination and viewed the photo as a point of departure. Man Ray, perhaps the most celebrated of the group, took his work beyond the camera, where he created Rayography, his signature cameraless process. Frequently cited as the quintessential Surrealist photograph, Dora Maar's "Portrait du Pere Ubu" took its name from the nineteenth-century play "Ubu Roi," an early work from the repertoire of the Theatre of the Absurd that dealt with incoherence, nonsense, and a defiance of authority. With their penchants for finding art within the discovered object, Breton, Man Ray, Dora Maar, Brassai, and Raoul Ubac, among others, thrust before the viewing public evocative images of infinite possibility and multi-dimensional meaning. These Surrealist photographers were aiming to capture a sense of chance by exploring the limitless boundaries of the subconscious, a world that convention still has yet to contain or to control. [show less]