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Photography and surrealism

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What is a surrealist photograph?

are shown as gathered together as in a conventional group portrait of ‘the surrealists’ (the signied meaning) and the picture (sign) mimics a believable scene (the referent). This is despite the fact that we know from the semiotic study of photographic images that this type of (signier + signied =) 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 Lucida 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 (lm or paper), remains the dominant ontological denition of photography. We readily and easily conate the picture with the thing represented – the illusion of photographic realism. Although the photograph is commonly dened semiotically as in-dexical, 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 eld 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 picture-sign conjured up (bird, animal etc.) has no necessary

See Umberto Eco, ‘A Cri-tique of the Image’, in Victor Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ) which, along with the editor’s essays, remains the best summary of the sustained structuralist inquiry into the semiotic 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, ).

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

In ‘Photography and Fetish’ Christian Metz notes, ‘indexicality, of course, leaves room for sym-bolic aspects, as the chemical image often looks like the object (Peirce considered photography as an index and an icon)’ October, no. , Autumn, , p. . Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotic denition of the sign as index, icon and symbol is the reference here. For Peirce, an indexical sign is ‘a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of being really affected by that object’. An icon is ‘a sign which refers to the Object that it designates merely by virtue of characters of its own’; as compared with the symbol, which is ‘a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of a Law, usually an association of general ideas’. Quoted from Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ), para. ., cited in Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Basingstoke: Macmillan, ), p. . See also Peter Wollen, Signs and Meanings in the Cinema (London: Secker and Warburg/BFI, ), especially pp. –.