Main Artists/Photographers in the Surrealist Movement

There are many surrealist photographers and artists who have contributed to the surrealist movement. The movement helped to enrich culture (this began in the early 1920s).

Eugène Atget

Atget was a professional photographer who took up the profession in the late 1880s. He lived a largely secluded life in his apartment in Paris. Atget was driven by the disappearance of buildings as modernisation swept the city of Paris. Atget is considered a forerunner of Surrealism and used modern approaches to the art of photography. He captured a distinctly modern experience of the city. Strangely, people began to study the work of Atget in the late years of his life when he met Berenice Abbott, a young american working in Paris for the photographer Man Ray.

Maurice Tabard

Tabard studied photography in New York and then returned to his hometown in France in the late 1920s and experimented with double exposures and solarisation techniques, produced surrealist portraits and still life’s. He worked in many photographic industries like fashion, portrait and advertising photography industries however, later on most of his negative archive of work was lost during World War Two. Tabard was the co-founder of the Surrealist movement and produced lots of surrealist portraits. He developed his own technique for surrealist imagery.

A lot of surrealists use random juxtaposition (this is when the artist uses unrelated objects together, forcing the viewer to create links between the objects.) Tabard experimented with this technique.

 

Sigmund Freud

Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. He is regarded as one of the most influential (as well as controversial minds) of the 20th century. Freud’s influences can be felt all over the world. He gained inspiration from this teachers, and in return, inspired many others not just in the world of psychotherapy but also in the world of art.

Freud practised self analysis and over time became overwhelmed with the “power of imagery and the sway of pictures that came to dominate “his conscious thoughts”.

Some of the things that Freud believed:

We watch our dreams in the theatre of the night.

Dreams can develop from feelings of anxiety that the dreamer may or may not be aware of.

This video explains a bit about Sigmund Freud and how he contributed to the Surrealist movement (mostly the start of the video references Freud).

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpNG4uRnlrQ]