The movement on surrealism photography based in and around Paris, began around 1920's- and is a continuous movement which occurs around today. Surrealism photography was an expression of truth trying to reach the unconscious mind through rational ways presented in a abstract and 'dream' like style.
Surrealism photography was majorly orientated around Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) theory of the consciousnesses He believed that you could access someones unconscious mind through everyday thoughts, proposing different methods, such as free association and the sequences of words and ideas and how this can be interpreted in your unconscious mind.
Through photography, photographers expressed this visually, by approaching it in the similar ways of psychoanalysis For example they would maybe point there camera irrationally recording everyday life to try and access the unconscious mind. Lee Millers approach to surrealist photography was very similar to this method as he would constantly photograph everyday life, this element of freezing chance in an everyday world was a explorative way to surrealism.
As you can see here the image, Untilted (exploding hand) 1930 appears very naturalistic however can be interpreted very mysterious and 'dream' like. From the repetitive scratches in the window, and the link with the caption 'exploding hand' we associate the two together which relates very abstract imagery. The simple shapes within the image also make it very delusional appearing to also be abstract.
Similarly, to these ways of photographing everyday life Brassia (1899-1984) photographed everyday objects, but he did this in a complimentary artistic way which represented these everyday objects to be sculptures/works of art. This way of approaching everyday objects, was to explore the different ways our minds work, and how our unconscious mind and thoughts can influence to create this 'involuntary sculptures'.
This image here 1993 Involuntary sculpture' explores the way how our unconscious mind has creatively ripped up this bus ticket to create this 'work of art'.
Surrealism can also be defined by making no social message, but just photographing the 'ordinary next to the extraordinary'. For example Brassai did another series of work, this photograph here of what appears to be an old woman looking at lingre. The stereotype of what we see elderly people to be, and the association of the lingre is very unusual and weird. This everyday actions, which is captured to be unusual can be seen as surrealism.
Surrealism can also be used as a way to communicate representations of signs and symbols. For example Renne Margritte was a belgian surrealist painter who explored the differences between representations and reality. An example of this he used was where he painted a pipe, he argued ''This is not a pipe, its a painting of a pipe' .
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