Much has been written about Surrealist painting and sculpture, but most of the erotic, disorienting and exquisite Surrealist photographs of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Brassai, Salvador Dali, Andre Kertesz and Hans Bellmer have remained all but unknown - until now. Traditional criticism has viewed Surrealist photography as a pale imitiation of authentic Surrealist work. The assumption has been that photography, a "realistic" medium, is fundamentally incomptatible with a cause devoted to the wildly subjective, the world of dreams and the unconscious. As a consequence, Surrealist photography, a major body of 20-century art, has remained largely unexplored. This text studies the crucial role photography played in the Surrealist movement. It shows how photographers enlisted into the service of "subjective" Surrealism their medium's very claim to "objective" reality. Of greatest interest, of course, is the book's abundant reproductions of the fantastic and distorted photographic creations that must be ackowledged as an important part of the Surrealist oeuvre.
