February 15th, 2012
Surrealism in 1920’s Photography
The 1920s and 1930s saw the emergence of the rhetoric of modernism. Modernism infused a revelatory sensibility aligned to Surrealism with the use of medium in photojournalistic and documentary enterprise. For the first time in history, books of photographs became appearing on both provincial and cosmopolitan subjects which were formally sophisticated and culturally savvy. The Hungarian Andrew Kertesz and his compatriot Brassai, for example, had their pictorials run in the Parisian magazine ‘Vu’, in which their haunting photographs of the city’s denizens, boulevards, and cafes at night featured. The two photographers in question would never be caught without their usb camera leads.

Henri Cartier-Bresson’s personal theory of photography was articulated in his 1952 book, The Decisive Moment. In this book, Cartier-Bresson called for photographers to include a preternatural sense in their photos, which for him resulted in photographs that united both social and spirited piquancy. One can observe the profound influence that Breton’s Surrealist notions of the marvellous and the uncanny had upon photographers in the late 1920s. Photographers began using medium to convey the oddness of life in their photographs.




