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Photography and surrealism

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What is a surrealist photograph?

just a gap opened between signier and signied, but an explicit intervention and signifying contradiction (oxymoron) introduced into the signier itself. Exactly what is being communicated, ‘signied’, is not clear; it has become opaque, ‘enigmatic’. No longer purely mimetic, the photograph confuses the usual status and conventions of a photographic image with respect to reality. It introduces fantasy. Any range of techniques can be used to produce disruptions of a conventional photographic signier, with the camera (lens shifts, focal plane and angles of view, uses of lighting etc.); or in prophotographic imagery the stage set, geometry, props and tricks; or laboratory techniques in the darkroom (double exposures, solarization, photograms, masking frame distortions etc.); or the use of collage, extra-visual text or montages fabricated on a studio table – as is the case in Le Violon d’Ingres.

Thus far, the respective differences between the three categories are briey summarized in semiotic terms: () mimetic – a believable signier of a believable signied; () the prophotographic – a believable signier of a surreal (unbelievable) signied; and () enigmatic (enigraphic!) – a signier which is itself ‘surreal’ and obfuscates a ‘proper’ signied meaning or sense. I want to argue that in fact any of these three categories of photograph can be and is employed in historical surrealism to produce surreal meanings. It should be stressed that these three modes are types of signifying relations rather than types of sign with exclusive differences, even if the last category of ‘enigmatic’ appears at rst to have a privileged (though not necessary) claim as a ‘surreal’ sign. It is also impor-tant to recognize that all these categories of photograph, mimetic, prophotographic and enigmatic (as signiers) have potential for enigmatic/surreal effects (as signied meanings), because surrealism as a discursive practice is a mode of treating signs, rather than any essential particular type of sign. Indeed, like Charles Sanders Peirce’s triad model of signs as index, icon and symbol, any image or text in surrealism may have one, two or a combination of all three – mimetic, prophotographic, enigmatic – modes of signication operating at the same time. Surrealism shows itself as an interruption within ‘rational’ discourse of precisely what can be signied in

The photograph was actually taken in New York (where Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass was in storage) before Man Ray left for Paris in .

See Chapter , ‘The Oriental signier’.