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INTRODUCTION SPARE PARTS
DOUBLING HYPNAGOGIA
BODIES CONSTRUCTING FEMININITY
introduction
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN particularly smitten with surrealism. I nearly wet myself upon seeing some of Salvador Dali’s paintings in Prague two years ago. While I’ve never considered myself a surrealist, the underlying ideas of surrealism frequently creep their way into my subconscious and out onto my canvas. Until recently, when studying the works of photographers such as Hans Bellmer and Man Ray, I didn’t understand the marriage between surrealism and photography. Frankly, it seemed paradoxical. In her article “Photography in the Service of Surrealism,” Rosalind Krauss writes that on surface level, the two cannot exist in the same realm, saying, “For surrealism was defined from the start as a revolution in values – a reorganization of the very way the real was conceived.” However unlikely, surrealism began to take hold of photography after the First World War. Though manifested uniquely by each artist, I see common ties in all of their work. Most prevalently, I see a desire to reconcile the uncertainty in gender roles postwar. In this photo essay, I seek to visually analyze the techniques and elements surrealist photographers use to understand gender. In its essence, it is also my own reconciliation of gender roles, particularly, a study of the surrealist constructs of femininity. 5
spare
parts
“Hans Bellmer’s photographs of distorted and deformed dolls from the early 1930s seem to be quintessential examples of surrealist misogyny. Their violently erotic reorganization of female body parts into awkward wholes typifies the way in which surrealist artists and writers manipulated and objectified femininity in their work.”
-Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinites
SURREALIST PHOTOGRAPHERS in the early 20th century constructed a view of the female body that has lingered not only in the art world, but has shaped mainstream mass-media views of the femininity. Drawing inspiration from pornography and advertising, these photographers took the male gaze to an entirely new level. In some cases, they literally manipulated the female body. Hans Bellmer did just this in his Doll series. He dismembered dolls and created new forms. The female body was just a collection of spare parts, taken apart and then re-assembled. This is my response to those photographs.
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DOUBLING
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DOUBLING is a technique used by surrealist photographers in which bodies, or generally, parts of bodies are duplicated in a photograph. With the advent of digital photography, and shortly after, photo manipulation software, this technique is easy to replicate. However, the surrealist photographers of the early 20th century did not have access to these resources. They created multiple exposures in camera or, often times, they exposed the same negative multiple times on the same frame. I decided to try some in camera doubling. My digital camera is not capable of multiple exposures, so I had to do something else. Using a strobe light, I adjusted the shutter speed of my camera to allow less light in over a longer period of time. Because of the time lapse between light flashes from the strobe, I was able to move my camera with the subject of these photos to capture movement over time. This particular technique reflects surrealism in that the perception of time is manipulated by light. The photographs can be observed in one moment, but because they were taken over a period of time, reality is disturbed and thus becomes the surreal. I also manipulated some images in photoshop to reflect the techniques more used in photo collage or in processing in the darkroom. However, my take in editing these photos of women is one of feminism and empowerment. The woman is shown with her chin up. She is able to recognize her performance of femininity, and does not denounce it. In her multiplicity, she is powerful. She is not the construction of a man’s anxiety, rather a fellow woman’s respect for her feminine beauty and power. 12
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The term hypnogogia refers to the transition period between wakefulness and sleep. In this period, hallucinations are most prevalent. This doesn’t necessarily mean total trip-out hallucinations. This generally manifests itself in small ways. You hallucinate getting a glass of water or turning the music off, but you wake up parched and the music is still on. However, in this state, there are extreme cases of hallucination in which more drastic and surreal images are produced. Art scholars have often described surrealism as ‘hypnagogic.’ Works categorized as surreal often hold this quality of distorting reality. Beyond that - surrealist works often contain dream imagery. We see it in painting and photography alike. Salvador Dali’s Persistance of Memory, likely the most well-known surrealist work, shows melted clocks. In dream theory, this is representative of a person’s reliance on time and is a subconscious manifestation of anxiety in accordance with time. In photo surrealism, most of this type of imagery is produced through distortion of bodies and of image. For the first image in my series, I wanted to go back to this idea of hypnogogia being the state between dream and reality. Two girls stand vacant with the image of a screen test projected over their bodies. My generation was raised on images. I remember spending the night at my best friend’s house growing up. She would always leave the TV on when we were sleeping. There was this dreary point where the images from the screen became printed on my brain and my subconscious fell prey to the voices on the magic box. I couldn’t separate reality and imaginary. I still, to this day, do not know what waa really in Avatar and what was my dream. Other images of this series play on dream imagery. Clouds and water appear in a significant amount of my dreams, so I decided to use that. There is a clarity that is compromised in each of these images. In terms of surrealism, this lack of clarity represents the blurred lines of gender roles - specfically the roles of women. Often, subconsciously even, women lose their identity to societal constructions of gender..
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bodies
For years, artists have been looking at the human form for inspiration. After a while, it seems, the art world decided they had seen enough fair maidens lounging on chairs or grassy plains with long, wavy hair framing their voluptuous breasts. Picasso famously distorted the female form into shapes. The surrealist photographers were exports on distorting the female body. Scholars claim this is a manifestation of gender anxiety after the war. From Han’s Bellmer’s dolls to Man Rays fragmented bodies to Andres Kertesz’s mirror tricks, they all did it. Occasionally, a multilated male form was found in their works, but these photographers were masters at manipulateing women’s bodies. As a feminist, I have a hard time understanding the line between sexual imagery and artistically capturing nude forms. In photographing nude men and women, I hoped to reconcile these ideas, all while projecting my own anxieties.
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CONSTRUCTING Femininity More than dreams or dolls or twisted bodies, surrealism is about the constructed. It is about trying to understand something through art. It is about reconciliation. It is about pushing what is natural to take another form. While these images may not be considered surreal because they lack a certain edge or oddity, they illustrate the construction of gender - specfically the female gender. I asked my friends to perform femininity to the most extreme extent they knew how, and these are some of the images.
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