Surrealism refers to photographic practices linked to surrealism, exploring dreams, the unconscious, and irrationality through techniques such as rayographs.
Surrealist photography showed that a medium so bound to reality could itself produce the uncanny — that an utterly ordinary photograph can look strange once its context shifts.
Surrealism's core discovery for photography was that the medium's very indexicality — its claim to record what is real — could be turned against itself, making the familiar uncanny through displacement, chance, or a simple change of context.
Surrealism refers to photographic practices linked to surrealism, exploring dreams, the unconscious, and irrationality through techniques such as rayographs.*1
On this site, photographers connected to Surrealism appear mainly from 1910–1920s to 1930–1940s, often overlapping with Dada and Rayograph / Photogram.*2
Surrealism often overlaps with Dada and Rayograph / Photogram. Reading those pages together makes it easier to see where method, institution, or critical language begins to diverge.*5
American-born artist who worked at the heart of Dada and Surrealism in Paris. Through Rayographs, solarisation and fashion photography, he transformed photography from a …
Lee Miller was a photographer whose war photographs and Second World War reporting grew out of Surrealist darkroom work, Vogue photography, and a sharp understanding of how …