Visual Culture Studies: photography

Task

Research surrealism and sexuality in 1920's art, photography and film.

After the Dada art following the first World War, realism went out the window. The movement started in Paris (the center of Surrealism) and from the 1920's it spread across the globe.

The art of surrealism featured a lot of sexual connotations, with basic human fears, motivations and instincts being the focus. These emotions and desires were almost animalistic and these were the parts of the brain these artists were trying to access.

"Eroticism is the force majeure that drives Surrealism. It is the great liberating power. It is always present, wether overt of hidden- a constant sourse of disturbance..." 1

One of the most well-known and popular artists of the surrealist art movement was Salvador Dali, a Spanish artist born in 1904. Towards the late 1920s Dali had fully embraced Surrealism and his works were focused on his own sexual fears and eroticism.

Figure 1, The Great Masturbator, Salavador Dali, 1929

This was one of Dali's earliest surrealist paintings. It was an expression of his anxiety, again related to his sexual fears, especially of women and their sexuality.

"Dalí himself described it as "the expression of my heterosexual anxiety". In 1929 he was still a virgin, inhibited by deep-seated fears of female sexuality and anal obsessions." 2

Dali also made a film along with director Luis Bunuel, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog). It was a hit when released, being shown for over 8 months, and uses dream logic and a disjointed timeline to further the surreal experience. It was based on supressed human emotions, featuring scenes from dreams of Dali and Bunuel, including a moon sliced through by a cloud 'like an eye with a razor'.

Figure 2, A still from Un Chien Andalou showing a woman's eye being sliced open.

One of the biggest surrealist photohraphers of the time was Man Ray, who was introduced to surrealism by artists of the Dada such as Marcel Duchamp and Jean Cocteau. The women in his life were usually the subjects in his work, and he showed them off to the world whereas most artists would rather have kept their sexual partners to themselves.

Figure 3, Violon d'Ingres, Man Ray, 1924

In Paris Man Ray met one of his most prominent muses, Kiki de Montparnasse, and the images she inspired him to create were possibly the most openly erotic ever produced. Violon d'Ingres is probably the most famous, and the title is a mischievous play on words, with the 'f' shaped violin holes adding the famous final touch.

"The woman's back is in itself an instrument, and one that the skilled player (the lover) can coax into life with his (or her) hands. ... Ray formed a link between "two distant realities", a game the Surrealists loves to play. The suggestive title implies that, by transforming his model into an object, Kiki has become a toy or plaything for Man Ray..." 3

This is again an example of the prominent sexual themes in Surrealism, prevalent throughout both the photography and art of the movement, while the film produced in this era had obvious themes in the human subconcious and dream logic.

List of Illustrations

Figure 1 The Great Masturbator, Salavador Dali, 1929, HARRIS, N. The Life and Works of Dali, Parragon, 2002, p. 15
Figure 2 Un Chien Andalou, Salvador Dali & Luis Bunuel, 1929, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Un_Chien_Andalou , 21/02/14
Figure 3 Violon d'Ingres, Man Ray, 1924, Man Ray, Grange Books, 2005, p.15

References

[1] BOUQUERET, C. Surrealist Photography, p. 4
[2] HARRIS, N. The Life and Works of Dali, p. 15
[3] Not Stated, Man Ray, p. 27

Bibliography

BOUQUERET, C. Surrealist Photography, (2007) Thames and Hudson, London
HARRIS, N. The Life and Works of Dali, (2002) Parragon Publishing, London
Not Stated, Man Ray, (2005) Grange Books, London

Task:

Research the use of photography to document war and conflict in the 19th Century.

In this task I will be researching the Crimean War and the American Civil War. The Crimean War was the first war to be documented through photography, and lasted from 1853 to 1856 between the Russian Empire and the French/ British alliance. Although Roger Fenton is considered the first official war photographer, the actual first war photographer known by name was a surgeon in the infantry.

"The first war photographer known by name was an amateur: John MacCosh, a British surgeon with the Bengal infantry." 1

However although Fenton was not the first, he was certainly one of the most prominent. He shot over 360 photographs during his stay in the Crimea, and was financed and commissioned by a firm of Manchester publishers hoping to exploit the pictures commercially.

By 1854 Fenton was well known as an artist after devoting his time to professional photography and was known for his landscape and portrait photography. The technology at the time and the way photographs were devloped meant that a photographer would need to to transport his processing equipment where ever he went.

"However, the wet-plate method had one major inconvenience: the glass plate for the negative had to be sensitized immediately before exposure and developed immediately after. For optimum quality the plate had to be damp during exposire and if it dried before development had taken place the clarity was also impaired. This meant that a photographer had to transport a complete darkroom whenever he went out to take pictures." 2

Figure 1, The Artist's Van, Roger Fenton

However because of this huge, bulky carriage, Fenton could not document any real battle scenes- and as well because his exposure times were long, almost all of his photographs were posed.

"His exposures had to last between 3 and 20 seconds, even in the best summer light- long enough to blur the slightest movement. Thus, Fenton had to pose virtually every shot." 3

Figure 2, Shadow of the Valley of Death, 1854, Roger Fenton

This image, Shadow of the Valley of Death, is perhaps one of the most recognised of Fenton's photographs from the Crimean war. It shows the cannonballs strewn across the valley, and apparently sums up the horror and ravages of the war within this one image.

The American Civil War was fought from 1861-1865 and was documented in full thanks to the efforts of Mathew B. Brady and his team. This time around there was no careful posing of photographs or nicely presented, censored shots. Brady exposed the war in full with over twenty other photographers which he organised throughout the war.

Figure 3, Collecting the remains of the dead at Cold Harbor, American Civil War, Mathew B. Brady

This kind of photograph would never have been taken in the Crimean war. Photos like this were very very real, hard hitting and shocking to the American public.

"Brady and his men photographed everything- bridges, bivouacs, dead and wounded, guns and fortifications, ruined cities, hospitals and prisoner-of-war camps, as well as many portraits of soldiers and generals alike." 4

Unfortunately the war photographs were still not as popular as artist's renditions of epic battles in newspapers of the time, again because of the technological limitations of the camera equipment and the artists inability to get to the front line as much as they would have liked. The war photographs looked too dead and still, with no animation or character to them, and so they remained unpopular in mass culture until WWII.

"Looking at issues of magazines and journals of that period, one finds that the photographs indeed look tame and dull, even lifeless, in comparison with the artists' versions. Only in the Second World War did the photographer start to produce sufficiently powerful and dramatic pictures to make the artist-illustrator obsolete." 5