Two pictures I hadn’t seen before by Pierre J ah an and Miroslav Hak particularly struck me, offering different takes on the popular Surreal theme of mannequins, but there are many such works in the exhibition. Even its title comes from a little-known suite of images made by Paul Nougé in 1929-30, which demonstrates the camera’s propensity to render the familiar in a strange way. As Roland Barthes put it (when talking about photography in general) the medium was ‘a new form of hallucination…a mad image of christian louboutin, chafed by reality’.
The exhibition includes key modernist photographs, many of which are vintage prints and which range from the baldly documentary to the heavily contrived. They show not only how important Surrealism was in the scheme of 20th century modernist photography, but also how central the transfiguring aspect of Surrealism is to photographic expression. The curators, Quentin Bajac, Clément Chéroux, Guillaume Le Gall, Michel Poivert, and Philippe-Alain Michaud, postulate that the photographie media weren’t simply tools for the Surrealists: through photography Surrealism found its ideal means of expression. Every Surrealist took or collected photographs it seems, even those on the literary wing of the movement, and the exhibition has many examples of the Surrealist snapshot. They also certainly loved messing about in the (then) new-fangled photobooths.
The exhibition also shows that, in addition to the heavily contrived work we think of as Surrealist photography, it was the first photographic movement to seriously focus on what we now term ‘vernacular’ photography. It subverted the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art – although from a French intellectual point of view, which is quite a distinction in itself.
The final part of the exhibition, Surrealism Put to Good Use, focuses on vernacular photography, in this case how sophisticated images by artists such as Man Ray and Dora Maar were absorbed back into mainstream photography when they were used in advertising, fashion, and even industrial contexts. Some of Man Ray’s finest Surreal photographs were made for a luxury promotional portfolio, Electricité (1931), for the company supplying electricity to Paris, and many other Surrealist photographs were made not for exhibition but for the printed page, either in the form of artist’s photobooks – another first for Surrealism – or the press, including ‘house’ magazines such as Minotaure and La Révolution Surréaliste.
As is necessary in any Surrealist exhibition, the journals, illustrated albums, photobooks, notebooks, manifestos, and maquettes (including one for Bellmer’s Les Jeux de la Poupée) are therefore very much in evidence, and repay careful attention. That, together with the various film screenings throughout, makes this a demanding but rewarding show.