Photography and surrealism : sexuality, colonialism and social dissent / David Bate.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bate, David, 1956-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Photography, Artistic--History.

Photography, Artistic.

History.

Surrealism.

Physical Description:

x, 272 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

London ; New York : I.B. Tauris, 2004.

Summary:

With the appearance of 'surreal' digital imagery on a daily basis in our culture, it is easy to forget the surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s. Photography, as the modern technology of the twentieth century, was central to the surrealists and this book is a fundamental and timely historical re-evaluation of the whole surrealist project and its uses of photography. Sensitive to the internal dynamics of surrealism, David Bate examines the surrealist attitude to the visual across the surrealist project in chapters that offer critical readings of surrealist images from their publications and exhibitions elaborating, for example, on the surrealist flirt with Orientalism, fascination with de Sade, preoccupation with the hysteric, and engagement with colonial and anti-colonial politics, guided always by the surrealists' work across the triangle of terms sexuality, colonialism and social dissent. Informed by notions of post-coloniality, by semiotics, psychoanalysis and photography theory, Photography and Surrealism re-reads key images in surrealism within their immediate historical context, mapping these readings across the progressive changes within surrealism itself and within the general framing dichotomy of photography and surrealism. The book is an original, clearly written critical re-evaluation of the use of photography in surrealism, which presents surrealism as a critical avant-garde project and returns surrealism to its proper historical and theoretical location.

Contents:

1 What is a surrealist photograph? 21

2 The automatic image 54

3 Sadness and sanity 88

4 The Oriental signifier 112

5 The Sadean eye 145

6 Black object, white subject 172

7 The truth of the colonies 203

8 Fascism and exile 235.

Notes:

Originally published: 1999.

Includes bibiographical references (pages [257]-265) and index.

ISBN:

1860643795

1860643787

OCLC:

51914522