Surreal Phantasmagories
Photo Feature by Ernesto Gonzalez Diaz
HAVANA TIMES – Surrealism is an artistic movement or creative style that emerged in France in the 1920s, as part of the artistic avant-garde. It has its fundamental bases in the Dadaism of Tristan Tzara and its main exponent was the writer André Breton. It was a time when photographers and writers worked closely together, some writers even took their own photographs to illustrate their texts. Salvador Dali, Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Marcel Duschamp, among other prominent artists were its main followers during the tremendous creative revolution experienced in the decades of the 1920s and 30s, the so-called interwar period.
Surrealism aims to surpass the real by promoting the irrational and the dreamlike. Surrealist photography will try to express what the world of the subconscious and dreams hide, which according to the majority of surrealist artists, hides the deepest concerns of the human being. It is good to highlight that when we talk about dreams it is done from a neurophysiological point of view, what we dream when we sleep, not dreams understood as personal, social, professional aspirations, etc.
The dreamlike, the phantasmagorical, the presence-absence of that being or beings, of which we dream daily, that lives only in our minds, in our feelings, in our thoughts, that visits us at night and steals our sleep, which does not exist in reality and yet makes us wake up every day to continue searching for it. Real-unreal beings, amorphous and diffuse at times, unknown and irreverent, are the fundamental protagonists of these images. A faceless woman who tries to fly, another who watches me at night, one who plays baseball naked and another who faces death, are ghosts from the past and present that make up this selection.
In surrealist photography you can find two very different aspects. One is technical surrealism based on photographic intervention and manipulation that is considered a rupture of reality. The other conceives the image as a documentary instrument that transmits the “objects found” by the photographer, which is the case of the images that we show in this work, Images that do not have digital intervention, which have been achieved with direct photography techniques.
The interesting thing about this style is the spontaneous search for the connection between reality and the subconscious, what we dream and what we live.
