Révolution surréaliste, no. ,
December , with three photographs juxtaposed by Man Ray. All the covers of
La Révolution surréaliste were
bright orange.
5 The cover of La Nature, no. , September .
La Nature had blue-toned
images and texts on its cover in contrast to the orange La
Photography and surrealism What is a surrealist photograph? separate from the texts either. Formally, the layout
of photographs is in, above, or across the magazine’s standard two-column format of texts, as in La Nature. The formal placing of images and written texts on a printed page ‘together’ leads us to assume a connection between the elements in terms of related meanings, by the fact of their contiguity, as Roland Barthes has shown us.8 In La Révolution surréaliste any such expectation of
a relationship is raised but frustrated: explicit or implicit connections are not provided. This opens up a semiotic space, a gap in meaning between images and texts. In contrast to the ideological assumptions of realism and verisimilitude in scientic, news and popular illustrated magazines, in La Révolution surréaliste the already poly- semic status of images is left open to semiosis, a drift of meanings from one to another along any chain a spectator cares to construct. This ambiguous, ‘oating signied’ of a playful surrealist semiotic openness of the image was worked out a decade before Walter Benjamin wrote his well-known comment that captions were an ‘essential component of pictures’.9 But the surrealists
also exploited the possibilities of picture–text relations as a way to introduce ambiguity.
Yet La Révolution surréaliste was more than a mere formal play on the layout of ‘scientic’ illus- trated magazines like La Nature. The very aim of La
Nature (a popular forum for scientic debate) was
also imitated by La Révolution surréaliste. Just as La
Nature was devoted to a ‘review of the sciences and
their application in arts and industry’ (the subtitle of the magazine), so La Révolution surréaliste also had a scientic research project of collecting and examining everyday pathological phenomena of ordinary people, dreams, slips and products of ‘psychic automatism’. The surrealists’ research was to examine, as the title of one of Sigmund Freud’s books conveniently puts it, The
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, those manifestations of
psychological thought processes and social actions of the human subject in everyday life (dreams, poetic acts, automatic writing etc.) which were usually disregarded as unimportant, except in psychoanalysis and surrealist life. Already in the ‘Bureau for Surrealist Research’ three months before the rst issue of La Révolution surréaliste, Roland Barthes, ‘The
Photographic Message’, originally published in Communications, no. , ; reprinted in Image– Music–Text, p. .
See Walter Benjamin’s ‘A Short History of Photography’ (), reprinted in Alan Trachten- berg (ed.), Classic Essays on Pho- tography (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, ), p. .
the surrealists were exploring the ‘interior reality’ of the mind as a kind of public scientic project. They had opened the Centrale surréaliste in October for public participation until it was so totally overwhelmed and besieged by response that they had to close it to the public. (They continued to interact with a wider public through the periodicals, exhibitions and via questionnaires and surveys.)20
Pictures of activities in the Surrealist Bureau ‘lab- oratory’ are shown on the front cover of the rst La
Révolution surréaliste (Figure ). The three photographs
are juxtaposed with one another with an outline drawn around them so that, ludicrously, they collectively look like a pair of shorts. The central and top image (the torso) shows the members of the surrealist ‘researchers’ in a formal group portrait at the bureau, while the two ‘leg’ pictures show surrealists engaged in their ‘research’ experiments. In the left-hand image, a hypnotic trance is depicted and on the right, a group of surrealists puzzling over automatic writing in an ‘automatic machine’ – the typewriter (see also Figure ). Under this ‘pair of shorts’ icon above the ‘Contents’ listing is a triangular-shaped manifesto proclamation, paraphrased from the French Revolution of : ‘
’ [sic]. Here again the surrealists mimic the picture-text cover format of La Nature (Figure ). The La Nature cover (no. , September ) illustrates the exciting scientic theme of ‘aviation motors’ with the picture of an aeroplane. In La Révolution surréaliste the ‘new declaration of the rights of man’ is accompanied by the images of their research activities. ‘The surrealist revolution’ is shown through hypnotic states and automatic writing. This surrealist activity becomes a kind of imperative for the ‘new declaration of the rights … ’; the ‘caption’ does not so much anchor their images (as ‘this is a picture of ’) as make a ‘relay’ between image and text, opening the image to different levels of reading.The obfuscation of any ‘normal’ captioning relation of picture to text is common to all the other covers of
La Révolution surréaliste.2 On the front of La Révolution
surréaliste number ( March ) a conventional
photograph shows two men peering down a hole in the
The Bureau of Surrealist Research was opened on October at rue de Grenelle, Paris (see André Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Mark Polizzotti [New York: Paragon, ], pp. –).
The use of linguistic text to anchor an image for Barthes means ‘With respect to the liberty of the signieds of the image, the text has thus a repressive value and we can see that it is at this level that the morality and ideology of a society are above all invested.’ Barthes, Image–Music–Text, p. .
Photography and surrealism What is a surrealist photograph?
street (see Figure ). That they are looking into a street drain, sewer or water conduit hole is an assumption made about the picture based on our experience of such things. We cannot, in fact, ‘see’ that it is a sewer in the picture, even though this would be a reasonable assumption to make. Beneath the picture, the caption