History of  Photography

Some quotes on surrealism:

 

 on the definition of surrealism: 

 

“the word ‘surrealism’ had been used first by Apollinaire in 1917 in a context that coupled avant-garde art with technological progress; his neologism possessed none of the psychological implications that the word would later take on..’Up to a certain point,’ wrote Breton in November 1922, ‘one knows what my friends and I mean by Surrealism.  This word, which is not our invention and which we could have abandoned to the most vague critical vocabulary, is used by us in a precise sense.  By it, we mean to designate a certain psychic automatism that corresponds rather closely to the state of dreaming, a state that is today extremely difficult to delimit.’  By the autumn of 1924, Breton had assumed exclusive rights to the magic word and in the Surrealist manifesto published then he gave it formal definition.:

 SURREALISM:  noun, masculine.  Pure psychic automatism, by which one intends to express verbally, in writing or by any other method, the real functioning of the mind.  Dictation by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, and beyond any aesthetic or moral preoccupation.  Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of dreams, in the undirected play of thought...”

 

                      -William Rubin, Dada, Surrealism and their heritage, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968.

 

Andre Breton on the surrealist object:

 

 “I am concerned, I say with facts which may belong to the order of pure observation, but which on each occasion present all the appearances of a signal, without our being able to say precisely which signal, and of what; facts which convince me of my error in occasionally presuming I stand at the helm alone.  Such facts, from the simplest to the most complex, should be assigned a hierarchy, from the special, indefinable reaction at the sight of extremely rare objects or upon our arrival in a strange place, to the complete lack of peace with ourselves provoked by certain juxtapositions, certain combinations of circumstances which greatly surpass our understanding and permit us to resume rational activity only if, in most cases, we call upon our very instinct of self-preservation to enable us to do so....

 

 As far as I am concerned, a mind’s arrangement with regard to certain objects is even more important than its regard for certain arrangements of objects, these two kinds of arrangement controlling between them all forms of sensibility.”

 

                    -Andre Breton, Nadja, New York: Grove Press, 1960  

 

“The photographic act is an act of submission.  Life prescribes its projects and sometimes its hypotheses as well.  The lens takes its own revenge by revealing, by uncovering what even the most skillful and sensitive observer does not always see, precisely because of his own two eyes....  Black & white and colors of night, and principles of the photographic image, illuminate it with a fire as inhuman as it is intelligent.  A photographic knowledge of the world is cruel.” 

 

                              - Pierre Mac Orlan,  Atget, Photographer of Paris, 1930

 

“The mere fact of transposing something seen to a photograph already implies a total invention: the recording of an unprecedented reality.  Nothing has proved the rightness of Surrealism more than photography.” 

-Salvador Dali, 1929