What is Surrealist Photography?
Surrealist principles presented an exciting challenge for photographers – while a painter can pluck from their imagination with brush and paint, a photograph is derived from the real, material world. Using a variety of processes and techniques such as photomontage (combining diverse photographic images to produce a new work), solarisation (exposing a partially developed photograph to light), and photograms (a cameraless photographic technique), photography soon emerged as a powerful medium for demonstrating Surrealist ideology. - V&A Museum
The horror of the First World War was the background for Surrealism - The violence and terror of real life shifted notions of sanity and reality.
In the the French writer André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto published in 1924 there was a rejection of rational ways of seeing the world, looking instead to dreams and the imagination for inspiration. Breton believed that creativity had been oppressed by the struggle of the day-to-day and sought to release the subconscious power of the dream-like state.
Surrealism embraced the absurd, the unconventional, and the shocking.
The movement influenced artists all over the world, demonstrating rich exchange. This included Americans who traveled to Europe and brought Surrealist ideas and techniques back with them, and, more importantly, Europeans who emigrated to the United States during the 1930s, as they fled the rise of Fascism.
Citations
“V&A · Surrealist Photography.” n.d. Victoria and Albert Museum. https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/surrealist-photography.
“American Surrealist Photography | MoMA.” n.d. The Museum of Modern Art. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/422.