Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (JSA)

In keeping with the first two issues of the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas, this third issue aims to broaden the horizon of critical concerns to which the publication is dedicated, turning our attention here to photographic contributions to the discourse of Surrealism and the Americas. Photography, of course, played a central role in surrealist practices since the movement’s inception, as the plethora of scholarship on the topic has underscored. It is thus not surprising that as the movement gained adherents across the Atlantic, the medium would find its calling in this new context as well.

In 1937, Ansel Adams described the photographs taken some sixty years earlier by Timothy O’Sullivan in the American West as “surrealistic and disturbing.” He was writing to Beaumont Newhall, who was then curating a landmark exhibition celebrating the centenary of photography’s invention.

This paper examines the 1930s as a formative moment in the Modernist history of photography. At this time, Adams and Newhall—influenced also by Alfred Steiglitz and Edward Weston—developed a history for their young medium that emphasized certain practices and approaches. The Western Survey photographs of the 1870s became cornerstones in this history, for they seemed to exemplify a photographic sensibility unencumbered by artistic aspiration.

A tension develops here between the attempt to define and restrict the medium, and the need to explain the strange qualities of these early photographs, leading to the invocation of surrealism. By examining surrealism’s deployment in this context, the paper provides a different angle from which to view the West as subject and surrealism as style in the history of photography.

In New York in 1944, the Surrealist magazine VVV published two photographs of the Arizona desert by Frederick Sommer. They are radical images in their minimalism and intensity of attention to (apparently) very little.

Sommer’s immediate connection was with Max Ernst, who saw these pictures when he visited Arizona in 1943. Later, when Ernst came to live at Sedona, the two men influenced each other’s work. Yves Tanguy also visited in 1951 and J. T. Soby suggested that the ‘breathless congestion of boulders, pebbles and bones’ in Tanguy’s last paintings derive from his experience of the desert as viewed through Sommer’s photographs.

Even in Europe, where Surrealism was predominantly urban, there had been an interest in the extreme landscapes of desert or jungle. But while Salvador Dali transformed rock forms into bodies, the challenge of the desert as Sommer depicted it was that no such transformation was possible. In addition, there was a Surrealist fascination with the "terrain vague"—land which is formless, void of composition—and it would be intriguing to extend the idea to Sommer’s desert pictures, which equally irritate the eye with their apparent lack of organization and focus.

It was Sommer’s meeting with Edward Weston that led to his use of a 10 x 8” camera to create the intensity of these pictures. But Sommer’s sense of the violence of the desert was at odds with the positive way it was depicted by Weston or Ansel Adams and his work was written out of photographic history for a long time. It’s no accident that it was rediscovered in the 1970s, when the myth of the American West was subjected to a severe critique and it’s intriguing to also place Sommer’s photographs in a lineage that goes back to Timothy O’Sullivan and forward to Richard Misrach.

Sommer’s work stands then at the intersection between the photography of the American West and Surrealism - between Edward Weston and Max Ernst. But it is also quite unlike either and, in their unflinching gaze at a subject that is both intense and empty, Sommer’s Arizona Landscapes profoundly undermine the conventions of vision.

Evoking a deChirican sensibility of “mystery and melancholy,” Laughlin capitalized upon, yet also ultimately contributed to, the mythology of mysterious New Orleans—city of the marvelous. Thus the possibilities and limitations of Regionalist Surrealism as place finds a test case there. Later in his career, Laughlin would go on to explore Surrealism as place with the rugged topography of the Arizona landscape. The changed locale is accompanied by a shift grounded in Dalian double images.

Francesca Woodman's emphasis on practice and the narrative quality of her photographic series links her to surrealism. With the caption to one of her Providence photographs she visually explores André Breton's definition of automatic writing by reformulating it as a kind of play, at once musical, textual, and visual: "Then at one point I did not need to translate the notes; they went directly to my hands." Michel Foucault's reformulation of Bretonian automatism as a kind of writing concentrated on experience helps to situate Woodman clearly in the surrealist tradition. She takes a turn reformulating surrealist activity herself in the manner of other surrealists like Robert Desnos who contributed to the "surrealist conversation" by providing his own definitions of terms. Like Breton, whom Foucault dubbed a "swimmer between two words," Woodman's photographic series function like visual narratives, making of her a swimmer between two worlds where the concentrated energy lies in the in-between spaces.

Woodman's experiments with space and time in her Space2 and On Being an Angel series further invoke surrealism's exploration of the liminal spaces between waking and dreaming that has led to its characterization as anamorphic. Like women surrealists before her, she concentrates on the body as the locus of automatic experience; like Desnos, she at times conceives of that body as transparent, as functioning like a "nocturnal bottle." She thus links the physical body with its psychic interior allowing her images to be read as maps to inner space.