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Important Photos and Artists of Dada and Surrealist Photography
Cut with the Kitchen Knife Through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919-20)
Though one of Höch's earliest works, this ambitious collage is unusual within her canon for being particularly large; it measures 35 x 57 inches. The piece was exhibited in the First International Dada Fair, which took place in Berlin in 1920, and it was reportedly one of the most popular pieces in the show. In the top right corner Höch pasted together images of "anti-Dada" figures of the Weimar government and representatives of the old empire. Elsewhere in the collage, known proponents of Dada, such as Raoul Hausmann, are arranged in contrast to these establishment figures.
The effect is initially one of visual confusion, and yet a kind of nonsense-narrative begins to develop with sustained attention. One figure is transformed into something else by the addition of a de-contextualised newspaper clipping, such as the Kaiser's iconic moustache replaced by a pair of upside-down wrestlers. The work encapsulates the eclecticism and eccentricities of Dadaism, but also makes a pointed political statement against the staid establishment; it is a carefully crafted homage to anarchistic opposition.
The piece expertly illustrates the Surrealist use of photomontage along with the technique of taking words and images from the established press to create a fresh, subversive statement that was highly innovative for the time.
Dust Breeding (1920)
This is an important example of early Surrealist photography, crossing the line between Dada and Surrealism in the early 1920s. It is a photograph taken by Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp's masterpiece The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-1923) after it had sat for three years gathering dust in Duchamp's studio. Dust Breeding is an important early example of collaboration in Surrealism; where two artists utilized the combination of imagery to defy literal presentation and concoct an all-together new piece in which one media interrogates and challenges another.
Although Dust Breeding is literally a close-up photograph of a dusty surface where the graphic lines of Duchamp's masterpiece peek through just visible, the resulting effort resembles an aerial photograph. When the work was published for the first time (in the early Surrealist journal Litterature), it was humorously captioned View from an Aeroplane. This points to Man Ray's aim of using photography in combination with language to trick the viewer's eye and to distort the viewer's powers of perception through psychic suggestion. It was one of the few photographs published in a Surrealist journal before 1924, hinting at its importance as an early example of Surrealist photography.
Contemporary photographer Sophie Ristelhueber was strongly influenced by Man Ray's photographs and by this work in particular. She argues that, "the constant shift between the infinitely big and the infinitely small may disorientate the spectator. But it is a good illustration of our relationship to the world: we have at our disposal modern techniques for seeing everything, apprehending everything, yet we see nothing."
Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres's Violin) (1924)
Le Violon d'Ingres is one of the best-known images in modern art. To create this work, Man Ray took a photograph of one of his favorite models, Kiki, and made her pose resemble a painting by Ingres. He subsequently painted two "F" symbols copied from the body of a violin onto the print, before re-photographing it. This is a powerful example of post-production manipulation being used to create a Surrealist effect in photography.
Man Ray's manipulation gives the work a number of layers of meaning. By re-photographing the print, Man Ray elides the original image with his manipulation of it, resulting in the woman's body being inseparable from the violin-like figurations on it. This confuses the viewer's understanding of the image: are those black marks painted or tattooed directly onto her skin or are we in fact looking at a woman with holes in her back like the body of a violin? Such confusion points to the inherent instability of the photographic image so often explored by the Surrealist photographers.
Art historian David Bate also argues that this image is a key example of the Surrealist disruption of the photographic issues of mimesis and the signifier/signified: "The signifying plane of the photograph itself has been disrupted [...]. No longer purely mimetic, the photograph confuses the usual status and conventions of a photographic image with respect to reality. It introduces fantasy."