"To collect photos is to collect the world" -SS

The Surrealist Aesthetic
  On Susan Sontag On Photography

For the second time in less than a year, I've made a trip to Manhattan while reading a book by Susan Sontag. What a combination!

Last time, I read Regarding the Pain of Others, and it made me think about what I was doing with my digital camera, and about filters and frames in general.

I felt my attitude changing. I bought a new camera. Higher resolution, for better capturing of details. I almost always have it with me, often unsheathed.

This time, I read ON PHOTOGRAPHY, possibly her most famous book, and as I read it I felt as though scales were dropping from my eyes and I suddenly saw what I was doing with my digital camera in a new light. The light of Surrealism.

"Photography," Sontag writes, "has the unappealing reputation of being the most realistic, therefore facile, of the mimetic arts. In fact, it is the one art that has managed to carry out the grandiose, ceuntury-old threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility, while most of the pedigreed candidates have dropped out of the race."

Before I read this book, I thought Surrealism was Salvador Dali's draping clocks, or WAITING FOR GODOT. Something quirky that sets normal perception on its edge. Now I think it's more, and although I'm not sure what, I am fairly certain I'm a part of it.

Like sitting at JFK, waiting for my Chicago flight, and the rain-slicked tarmac was gorgeous, like the Bay of Naples at sunset or something. I think that's part of the Surrealist aesthetic, so clearly advanced by photography (not to mention DIGITAL photography!): the mundane and the sublime are equivalent. It's whatever catches your eye. Whatever engages your mind.

Or look at these two pix from Chicago. On the left, installation in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Surreal. On the right, footprints in the sludge, an accidental and fleeting juxtaposition. Both collectible.

Surrealists, who aspire to be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries, have often been under the well-intentioned illusion that they could be, indeed should be, Marxists. But Surrealist aestheticism is too suffused with irony to be compatible with the twentieth century's most seductive form of moralism. Marx reproached philosophy for only truing to understand the world rather than trying to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it.    -SS

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton (1924)