everyday

First Assignment: Everyday body transformations

Surrealism was officially launched as a movement with the publication of poet André Breton’s first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. The Surrealists did not rely on reasoned analysis or sober calculation; on the contrary, they saw the forces of reason blocking the access routes to the imagination. Their efforts to tap the creative powers of the unconscious set Breton and his companions on a path that carried them through the territory of dreams, intoxication, chance, sexual ecstasy, and madness. The images obtained by such means, whether visual or literary, were prized precisely to the degree that they captured these moments of psychic intensity in provocative forms of unrestrained, convulsive beauty.

How surrealism explore the everyday and the body form in photography?

From the beginning Surrealists looked to the uncanny as a source of raw material for their writing and painting. Highmore in his text: ‘Surrealism, the marvellous in the everyday’, is making some interesting points about the surrealism and the everyday life. Surrealism attempt to make familiar, unfamiliar by making the ordinary strange, by transforming it to surprising contexts and placing it in unusual combinations such as collages, montages and ready-made objects. In surrealism the everyday is where the marvellous exist. Classic surrealist can be compared to the Sherlock Holmes, who is trying to discover the marvellous on the streets, because it is already there: in kiosks, automobiles, even in colour magazines.
Surrealists were dealing with different aspects like everyday life, dream imagery and also body. Human body is a very interesting subject to work on. Not only painters but also photographers were dealing with the deformation of the body. Rosalind Krauss in her article ‘Photography in the service of surrealism’ is pointing some of the techniques in which photographers worked. Some parts in deformation can take place in how does the photographer present the photograph. By cropping it he can make familiar unfamiliar. Photography came to occupy a central role in Surrealist activity. In the works of Man Ray and Maurice Tabard, the use of such procedures as double exposure, combination printing, montage, and solarization dramatically evoked the union of dream and reality. Other photographers used techniques such as rotation or distortion to render their images uncanny. Hans Bellmer obsessively photographed the mechanical dolls he fabricated himself, creating strangely sexualized images. In her close-up photograph of a baby armadillo suspended in formaldehyde, Dora Maar performs a typical Surrealist inversion, making an ugly or even repulsive subject compelling and bizarrely appealing.

In my assignment I am dealing with everyday life and the body. For this project my main inspiration was website called cyberium (http://www.cyberium.net/imagine/). It is a website for designers to create montages from human bodies, we can find there different categories such us: human animals, human robots, and human gods and so on.

I read some materials about the deformation of the body and the deformation of the objects and how you can combine these two categories together. Several surrealist painters and sculptures were talking about the concept of hybridization, in which two objects were combined to make a third unexpected one. Max Ernst, with his images of women turning into birds, had a theory that every object is linked to another, either psychologically or morphologically, even if their at first appear unfamiliar. Putting the two together therefore makes that subconscious link a conscious one.

Photoshop is a great help for digital artists and photographers, allowing them to do special effects which can create bizarre imagery perfectly as if such surrealistic scenes can really exist.

I created a set of different Photoshop montages. My final piece: Everyday life transformations is a set of 5 images.

In my project I wanted to make the familiar object unfamiliar, by creating revolutionary bodies or objects, by making them slightly disturbing, but the aim here was not to make it macabre.

Surrealism is a term most often associated with the traditional arts such as sculpture, painting and drawing. It seems a sort of contradiction of terms to coin the phrase ‘Surrealist Photography’, since the camera captures the mirror image of a reality as it has happened. But when surrealism and photography are paired together it can make for incredible imagery that is sure to leave an impression, and that former contradiction turns into perfectly paired magic.
Surrealism can be best described as an abstraction of reality. A diverged interpretation of what you see with eyes both open and closed. It is the stuff of dreams, nightmares, illusions, mystery, delusions and fantasy.