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Photography and surrealism

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What is a surrealist photograph
surrealist objects. Photography nevertheless occupied a
particular central place at that time, in that it vas
during this period ot the early tventieth century that
it increasingly became the mass and dominant pictorial
torm in vhich reality, the vorld, vas visually seen
and articulated. It vould be a singular tailure, then,
it a movement committed to an attack or negation
ot that vorld had ignored the means ot signitcation
through vhich it vas daily being constituted. 1hat the
reality ot the vorld as proposed by photographs vas
as susceptible as any other signitying system (literature,
poetry, paintings etc., to positing dream and reality
in the same (surreal, image is precisely one reason
vhy surrealism is ot historical importance in a history
ot photography.
Uncanny Signs
In recent years commentators on surrealism have
supplanted the marvellous vith the uncanny, vhich
at trst glance has an obvious use in the discussion ot
disturbing images. Various vriters have tocused on
dinerent motits as part ot the troubling aesthetic ot
uncanny photographs in surrealism: Posalind Krauss
vith doubling,
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Hal loster on a death-drive
4I
and
Bryony ler on automata and mannequins,
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all themes
that appear in lreuds essay 1he Lncanny (+,+,,
(note that Lncanny is already in scare quotes in lreuds
essay title,.
As others have reported, lreuds actual essay on the
uncanny is a rambling bundle ot observations vhich
itselt can give rise to uncanny disturbances and strange
teelings, or as it might othervise be translated, as having
a disquieting strangeness.
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Nevertheless, lreuds 1he
Lncanny essay can be summarized as making a single
proposition: the uncanny is something repressed vhich
recurs a habit already noted in surrealism. But it is
not merely the return ot the repressed, something
has to be added since not all return ot the repressed
gives an uncanny teeling. lrom this, lreud deduces
tvo major avenues through vhich the uncanny is
achieved, although he claims it is most successtul vhen
the tvo are combined. One is by enacing distinctions
betveen imagination and reality, creating an intellectual
o Posalind Krauss, 1he
Photographic Conditions ot
Surrealism, October, no. +,, Winter
+,:+.
+ Hal loster, Compulsive
Beauty (Iondon: MI1 Press, +,,,.
: See Bryony ler, Surrealism,
Myth and Psychoanalysis, in
Bryony ler, David Batchelor, Paul
Wood (eds,, Realism, Rationalism,
Surrealism (Iondon: Open Lni-
versity Press, +,,,.
Disquieting strangeness is
close to the sense ot the lrench
translation ot lreuds Das
Lmheimlich. lreuds essay vas
trst published in lrench as
Iinquietante etrangete in Essais
de psychoanalyse appliqu (Paris:
Gallimard, +,, much later than
vhen the surrealists could have
used it. Mladen Dolar (October,
no. :, lall +,,+, introduces a
term trom acques Iacan, extimit
(a condensation ot the tvo terms
intimate exteriority,, suggesting
that this is closer to the sense ot
ambiguity in the German Das
Lmheimlich.