The Art of Black and White Photography, 2nd Edition

12 Surreal Photography

Surrealism was an all-encompassing movement that expressed itself mostly in the visual arts starting in the 1920s. One of the founders of surrealism, André Breton, was strongly influenced by the revolutionary ideas of Sigmund Freud and thought a lot about mental associations. Freud was interested in discovering the repressions and suppressions of the human soul that were dormant and remained unrecognized in the inner self yet determined existence. The surrealists sublimated all the instinctive urges of the subconscious because they believed in the “omnipotence of the dream” (Breton) and started to express themselves creatively. Because the subconscious also expresses itself very strongly in images (dreams, for example), ...