everyday

The series of images “Bag Scan” is an attempt to reinterprets the surrealist strategy of “defamiliarising the familiar”. The analysis follows the aspects of surrealism, which relates to the concept of the “everyday” and the relevance of photography as a technique to deal with this subject. The analysis also shed light on the process of producing the series and explains the ways in which the images are dealing with the surrealist attitude towards the “everyday”.

In modern capitalist societies the concept of the everyday is associated directly with patterns of living and working. Most of the time the everyday represents the banal and the usual things in our lives. We tend to look beyond the everyday, in arts, science or religion, in order to find the troughs, beauty, or the marvellous.
The idea behind surrealism is that the everyday itself is everything at once. The marvellous live side by side with the banal in the everyday and it is only our patterns of thinking, which control our conceptions and relate to social process and commodification. “Surrealism is about an effort, an energy, to find the marvellous in the everyday, to recognize the everyday as a dynamic montage of elements, to make it strange so that it strangeness can be recognised” (Highmore B, 2002).

Originally surrealism was developed as a form of resistance to the pattern of thought which determine the everyday as banal. Breton’s technique of automatic writing has been used in order to bypass the restriction of the conscious mind in order to reach a more natural and troughsfull state of being. In visual arts, techniques of juxtaposing random elements together are being used for the purpose of making the ordinary looks extraordinary. However it is in photography where surrealism as a social research finds its best expression. “Photography is an imprint or transfer of the real: it is photochemically processed trace casually connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a way parallel to that of fingerprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave an tables” (Krauss R, ….). Photography has a special connection to the real in terms of an indexical relationship to it rather than iconic. As such, photography manages to hold on to reality as a form of document and blur the distinctions between artistic expression and the realm of the everyday.

My series of images “Bag Scans” attempts to deal with the surrealist notion of the everyday through scanning the content of people’s bags. Exposing the things that people carry with them throughout their negotiations of the everyday. In this series there are two types of images: an individual persons bag and the combination of two bags side by side in one image. The elements were arranged on the surface of the scanner for the main reason of showing what they are. The style of arrangement is a reflection on the manor in which the bag itself was arranged. The use of a scanner is parallel to the camera in its relation to the real. The scanner allows for minimal intervention to maximum exposure, mainly exposing the visual image of the objects.

The series “Bag Scans” captures the content of the peoples bag; it is a kind of document or evidence to the objects, which they carried with them on that day. The obvious surreal aspect of the images is the juxtaposition of the objects. By reviling the physical image of each object in relation to another object a collage of objects is been created and new shapes are born and carry with them new meaning. However by looking closely at the images some other pattern of thought creeps in and we start to analyse what we see in different ways. We start asking questions about the owners of the objects; we start using imagination in order to decipher the image as a code or a riddle. Questions regarding the gender of the owner their occupation the nature of the relationship between them. What is most surreal about the images is the viewer’s own state of mined; he is being transform from a mere spectator to being an analyst.

As a critical point to the analysis of the series the question ‘really?’ must be asked. Does surrealism really mean what I think it means and does this series of images really take the viewer in to another state of mined? While the answer to latter can be tested through observation the former prove to be elusive.

Bibliography

• Highmore, B. (2002). Everyday Life and Cultural Theory. London: Routledge. P 45-59 (Surrealism- The marvellous in the everyday). P45-53.

• Krauss, R. and Livingston, j. (1986) L’Amour for: Photography & surrealism. London: Art Council.