It seems paradoxical to conceive of the surrealist movement as having had a manifesto, and yet it did. (Actually, it had more than one! Manifestos were all the rage back then.) The first manifesto was written by the French writer André Breton in 1924. Of course, a good deal of humor must have gone into defining what was essentially indefinable. Even though we can't quite put words to what we expect from surrealism, we know the things we have come to find there: surprise, non sequitur, non-rational significance in images. The marriage of the world of dream to the world as we daily experience it creates surrealism. It is the whimsical juxtaposition of conscious and unconscious spaces.

While browsing the surreal category of photography on deviantART, it didn't surprise me to learn that this category is widely misunderstood. Surrealism often seems to be interpreted to mean simply "creepy", but that's not what it is. It is also evident that many people mistake the hyperreal colors that result from numbers of color and density in digital photography for surrealism. Hyperreal colors and density don't combine to make a photo surreal either. I wanted to find out just how many of the photographs residing in the category really lived up to its name when I set out to browse Photography -> Abstract & Surreal -> Surreal. I kept my eyes open for pieces that matched what I know about surrealism, which I can't claim to be a great deal, even though I can easily recognize pieces by the giants in the field: Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel, Antonin Artaud, Rene Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Man Ray, and André Breton. I wanted to find pieces that incorporated dream and waking, rational and non-rational, or used familiar quotes from the masters of surrealism. Here are some of the gems I found in photography's surrealism category. A couple of these photos reside in other galleries, though they could live quite happily among surrealist photographs. A surreal photograph is almost certain to turn up as a DD in the near future!


the photographs