everyday

The everyday and the uncanny

This photo project is built on the concepts of surrealism, the everyday life and the uncanny, to reveal what is invisible to the eyes. We will start by naming the different influences use in the project. Then we will describe the concept behind the series of photographs and the connection to surrealism.

My project was inspired by the work of Man Ray and more contemporary artist like Francesca Woodman, however the main influence behind it is Jindrich Styrsky with his book “On the Needles of These Days” (1934-1935). However I won’t go into the writing offered by the book. Antonín Dufek wrote in a press release for the ubu gallery New York September 21–October 22, 1994

“Styrsky’s photographs of found objects, store windows, graffiti, mannequins, posters and banners are records of immediate reality and illuminate the marvelous in the everyday. They are much in the tradition of Atget investigating the “concrete irrationality” of objective reality as interpreted directly by photography, although with a more developed modernist bent.” http://www.ubugallery.com/phpwcms/?id=34,172,0,0,1,0

Antonín Dufek mentions Eugène Atget who would be another influence, despite surrealism being posterior to his work.
-Avenue des Gobelins 1927 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/atgt/hob_1987.1100.113.htm

The idea behind this project comes from the book Everyday Life and Culture Theory more precisely chapter four ‘The marvelous in the everyday’, (page 47) by Ben Highmore:

“It is in the actually of the everyday, when passing a second-and shop, for instance, where umbrellas and sewing machines find themselves collaged together on a dissecting table” p47

The idea is to find the extraordinary in the everyday life and more precisely in the capitalist context of shopping windows. The pictures have not been manipulated because of the very nature of the subject; the uncanny rests in the everyday and to been seen we just need to look with different eyes:

Gersham 1974; Lewis 1988; Nadea 1987: “to see its products not as work of art but as documents of social research… juxtaposing of disparate element it generates a defamiliarisation of the everyday.”

The juxtaposition of the street reflection and unusual object in the vitrine assembles the everyday to consumption and acts as a critic to the system, for example: the ceramic object showing a hand pointing to its description ‘CERAMIC’ or the lizard looking into the camera with the street as background. Every picture possesses something strange, unreal. One of the main subjects are the mannequins. Working with mannequin refers to the work of Hans Bellmer “La poupee” (1934) and Cindy Sherman and the prosthetic dolls (1980). The mannequin are so realistic that the scene becomes surrealist; this refers to the picture framing part of the legs in a vertical position with refection of the pavement and street or the two mannequin hanging on hooks. The composition frames the photographer’s opinion, the scenario is rewritten through the viewfinder of the camera for you to see differently the everyday.