Surrealist Photography - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... The essay "Surrealist Photography" analyzes photography and surrealism. Phantasmagorical is characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous juxtapositions. J.C. Powys defines it as the “incongruous imagery in surreal art and literature”. Beginning mostly in Europe, with some Americans participating, Surrealism featured a number of rebellious and strange artists. They used disjunctive and bizarre comparisons and contexts to try to break through to a cultural subconscious. In the course of making their art, they wanted to expose the hypocrisy that lay at the heart of what they considered to be a decadent, bourgeois world that only they truly understood. The work of Sigmund Freud and his understanding of the human mind had a great impact on the development of surrealism, but the similarly new field of photography truly opened up the field to new speculation. The ideas of Sigmund Freud, which are now relatively widely known, combined with the spiritual goals of Expressionism to give rise to Surrealism and its expression of the inner dream-state of the artist. Freud’s ideas include the subdivisions of the human mind into the subconscious and the conscious. Within this distinction, Freud says the true, natural inner nature of the man can only be found within the much larger and mostly secret labyrinth of the subconscious mind. While this subconscious mind cannot be directly accessed by the conscious mind, hints and suggestions from it can be received through dream imagery. Some processes become conscious easily. ...Download file to see next pagesRead More