How the concept of surrealism in photography can help artists express their inner thoughts and portray their opinions and views on events that are going on. 

The theme which I focus on in my personal study follows the odyssey of four feelings; change – euphoria – love – regret. For myself, the idea and concept of change has a journey – how change makes you feel euphoric, and you fall in love with your new life but may still suffer with the feelings of regret.  There have been many changes occurring in the past few years of my life, and its changed me as a person, ripped away any safety nets, and started building the person I am now at present. My personal study is going to document how change can affect you emotionally and spirituality as a person, specifically focusing on illness, divorce, loss, lack of love and the idea of rebuilding your so called normality all over again. I will also be looking into the aspects of change when you want things to stay the same, and when things aren’t changing even though you want them to. All of these aspects and changes that happen in life can have a relentless repercussion on your mental view on things, often becoming twisted and confusing for yourself to even fathom. Surrealism and the prospect of dreams also play a vital role in the pieces of art I have created, and so I will be exploring the historical context of surrealism and touching slightly on Dadaism.

Whilst my personal investigation focuses on raw life events and situations, I wanted to explore the groundings of surrealist art, including Dadaism as my work is heavily influenced by these prominent movements. Around the start of the surrealism period, around 1920, the economic boom had ceased, and America had began the period called the Great Depression. The Surrealism movement had started, which was heavily influenced by dadaism and abstractism, but was also affected by the Great Depression. “It was the first time in U.S history that a widespread movement of artists began addressing politics and using their art to influence society  Andre Breton defined surrealism as “psychic automatism in its purest state, by which one proposes to express verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner, the actual functioning of thought.” (MoMA)                  Bretons reasoning preposes that artists neglect the rhyme and reason of reality, and tap into a deeper state of their unconscious minds. This statement that Breton made is the basis to my creative work in this personal study, and signifies the meaning and deeper context behind the work that I’ve created. Another significant individual linked to surrealism was Sigmund Freud, who wrote the book “the interpretation of dreams” (1899).  Through this book he recognised and covered the importance of dreams and the unconscious as valid reasons for human emotions and certain lusts. The vulnerability he gave to such topics, including desire, sexuality, sensuality and mental facades created the theoretical basis for much of surrealism.

 I focused mainly on mental facades, desire and sensuality during this study, incorporating aspects of reality and unconscious states of mind, thoughts and dreams. Through this, I tried to merge all topics of interest into one, as they all have some sort of link with each other in the first place. Most surrealist artists would rely on their own unique reoccurring motifs through their work that appeared in dreams of certain unconscious states, such as Salvador Dali’s clocks. This imagery would more often than not feature in their creative pieces, generally coming across as outlandish, perplexing and somewhat uncanny as it would throw the viewer from their initial assumptions. I found this somewhat comical and amusing, as the photographer was the one who was in control of tricking the viewer with their own creations. For me, I found this fascinating as you could almost control what the viewers were perceiving.

Katrien De Blauwer is a photographer/ artist who uses collage to portray memories and reminisce on  certain times. Her images normally include female figures that have been collaged together with other images and mixed media such as paint, pen and natural materials such as dried flowers. She started off studying painting, but later moved on to Photography and fashion as she found the certain subject matter involved  more alluring. She explored collage for years, and at a later age began collecting, cutting and recycling images as a form of therapeutic self investigation. Whilst this self investigation brought up many questions for herself, challenging personal views and beliefs, it also questioned her viewers

 De Blauwer calls herself a “photographer without a camera”, as she seeks out, collects and recycles pictures and photos from old magazines to create a direct communication with our unconscious  and our anonymous minds thanks to the use of found images and body parts that have been cut away. This way, her personal history and creative journey becomes the history of everyone; each individual can interpret and relate to each of her works in whatever way they feel appropriate. The collage effects a kind of universal audience, emphasising the impossibility to identify with a single individual, yet allowing to recognise oneself in the story. The artist becomes a neutral intermediary: without being the author of the photographs, she appropriates and integrates them into her own interior world, a world she’s revealing in third person.

“Memory by accumulation rather than by subtraction.”

Lissy Elle is a young photographer who shoots in film and combines documentary photography with surrealist elements. Most of Elle’s  projects and works have focused on her mentality in different stages and places of her life. When asked ‘What is the most important element about a photograph?’, she stated “An emotion, no matter how clichéd that might sound. You can always tell if someone created a piece from a technical place or an emotional place. You can do everything right in terms of lighting and composition and still make a flat and dull photograph. I want to see what you were feeling and what you were thinking and why I should care. If you don’t care then I don’t .” (EZRAMAGAZINE.Bolger.2019:5)

Whilst Elle’s main body of work focuses on candid documentary photography, mainly focusing on her spontaneous outings with close friends, she tends to incorporate surrealist, almost darkly comical aspects into these works, seemingly bringing a representation of deeper meaning and more complex, mature emotions – like exposing adulthood as a darker place then we may think. The ways in which she creates her surrealist imagery are very sophisticated and subtle, adding an obvious modernistic approach to the look of her creations, along with dream like imagery and adaptations that were obviously counterfeit. This fuelled my motivation to incorporate visual surrealism, not just surrealist context behind my pieces. I found it challenging incorporating both real life events and dreams or thoughts/ mindsets together at first, but as I worked on my personal study I discovered how they both can influence each other in terms of certain situations in my life impacting greatly the quality of my mindset.   

 In essence, it is obvious that the concept of surrealism can help artists and photographers to express their emotions and explain certain events that have impacted their lives greatly. This is obvious due to the idea of how the Great Depression influenced the surrealist art movement to a degree, and how Katrien De Blauwer works with old images for her own therapeutic self investigation. 

Bibliography 

https://www.theartstory.org/movement/surrealism/

www.moma.org

www.huffpost.com › entry

INTERVIEW – Lissy Laricchia

http://katriendeblauwer.com/about

http://www.lissyelle.com/about

change is inevitable

The physical dynamics of my photobook

I will be handmaking my own photobook, including the printing, editing, binding, text, and the overall assembly of the book.

For the book cover, I am using the shell of an old diary I kept a few years ago, which is sentimental and relevant to the topic of my book. Its roughly the size of an A6 sheet of paper, maybe slightly bigger as it has to house the A6 contents. Its also a hardback, with a textured red covering similar to a snakes skin.

Im planning to use my old dymo label maker, which used to be my moms when she was young, to create the title on the front of the book. I’m also planning to incorporate a simple photograph right in the middle aswell, creating a minimalistic but bold demeanour.

Both the front page and the back pages of the book will be thin, lightweight tracing paper to give the book an unclear, surreal opening and closing. Between each signet, which will only be 1 folded a5 page, I’ll bind in the smaller sheets of paper with the handwriting. I’m hoping that using a variety of differences sizes and types of paper will give the book less fluidity and structure, as I’m not showing my photographs in a linear order.

I guess this is the place where it all started, in Youghal, Ireland. This is where my mum grew up and spent most of her young life, and its still the family home today which houses my auntie and her two dogs.

I’ve been my most creative here.

I’ve been my most vulnerable here.

I’ve been my most happy here.

A wall in my bedroom. my bedroom. One of the few places where I feel creative and able to see things clearly.

This photograph was taken the evening my dad left the house, sometime in January of last year. It was a monumental occurrence that effected all lives involved in his movement, but mostly for the better rather than the worst. It relived the stress from all of us.

This Photograph was taken during one of my stays at the Jersey General Hospital in 2016, when I was the sickest I’d ever been. For this particular stay, I spent 2 months on bed rest, with the only view I had being out of one single window, overlooking the outskirts of town and out to the sea. During the start of my illness, I was convinced that there was nothing wrong with me, and because I thought there was nothing wrong, I didn’t see any point in getting better and committing to recovery. But deep down I knew there was a serious issue I had to face and acknowledge in order to keep living.

It was hard being cooped up in a hospital where real life was only occurring everywhere besides in the hospital. So I tried to find comfort and happiness in the little things I had access to; like the view out my window. It was the only thing that was close to real life that I could lose myself in.

my family had eyes but could not see the sickness which was controlling me. at the end of the day I knew I needed help but I was too deep in my own shit to be able to catch a breath and acknowledge how sick I was.

rolling my eyes because sometimes things change too quickly for my head to keep up with. Why can’t things slow down a bit. I know time is just a concept, but we are ruled by it with such vengeance.

I always seem to feel little fireflies buzzing round in my head. one evening it got too much and they started to emerge out of my eyes in an orderly fashion.

Hospital x2. same meaning different angle. featuring Stanley the rabbit who’s been with me since 24th September 2001.

A tree in the back yard in my family home in Ireland. Has always been there ever since I was a baby, but probably not for much longer as things tend to change.

A more practical approach to letting negative things go… try breathing them out. It doesn’t really work but its worth a go.

A second photograph taken on the night my dad left, except at a different angle.

A self portrait in my room. where everything that I need is there right in front of me.

• Book in hand: how does it feel? Smell, sniff the paper.

The book has a sort of musty smell, almost mirroring the contents and obvious context thats being portrayed in the book. Initially, the book is weighty in hand, considering the average amount of pages it possesses

• Paper and ink: use of different paper/ textures/ colour or B&W or both.

Throughout the book medium to heavyweight paper is used, probably around 100 – 110 grams, and there is no change in this. It creates some form of structure, unlike the the book where the time frame of images jump from 1998 to 1995. Most, if not all, images are shot in coloured film with the majority having a slight cold colour undertone – perhaps it was the type of film used, perhaps she edited them or maybe it was the the surroundings fault that cause this to occur.

• Format, size and orientation: portraiture/ landscape/square/ A5, A4, A3 / number of pages.

The book is roughly A4 and portrait, although most images inside are landscape. It consists of 112 pages, with images both on the left and right hand side with handwritten subtexts and dates – very brief but effective.

• Binding, soft/hard cover. image wrap/dust jacket. saddle stitch/swiss binding/ Japanese stab-binding/ leperello

case binding has been used, with around 2 dozen signets being bound together and combined with the hardback cover.

• Cover: linen/ card. graphic/ printed image. embossed/ debossed. letterpress/ silkscreen/hot-stamping.

On the front of the hardback cover there is a solitary image bang in the middle, a portrait of Tara St Hill, an upcoming model at the time and who is the main feature in this photo book. Below the photograph there are handwritten words that write, “Corinne Day Diary”, which is the title. Although the text is handwritten, it has obviously been scanned onto a computer and been inserted digitally. This happens to be the same on the back of the book where she has written a short message predominantly directed towards her close friends, and signed it off with her name. Her handwriting is also prevalent on the back inside page where she has written a thank you, who it was edited by and the copyright and publishing text that goes along with any book that is published. In a way, Tara using her handwriting to write seemingly unimportant things such as copyright information could be seen as comical, but mostly it made me feel like I was almost snooping at her most private of creations. This creates a bond with the viewer from the very beginning

• Title: literal or poetic / relevant or intriguing.

Whilst the title is pretty relevant and obvious, “Corinne Day Diary”, the context of the book is soaked with an unconstrained aura of a poetic nature. There is no beating around the bush when it comes to the context of this book, as all images look unedited and somewhat candid, but at the same time Day manages to incorporate

• Narrative: what is the story/ subject-matter. How is it told?

No doubt there is a narrative to this book, but it does not follow in the order of events which occurred. Day had given the impression of making her own narrative out of a group of photographs taken between 1990 and 1999. There is no linear sequence to these group of photos: they simply jump time frames on almost every page.

Lissy Elle is a self made photographer and art director living in Brooklyn, New York, and Los Angeles, California.

She grew up in rural Ontario, Canada, where her passion and interest for photography started emerging at age 12, spurred by an obsessive and uncontrollable fear that one day she would forget her entire life if as she weren’t to document it. Her body of work is often inspired by this compulsion to photograph, as well as by the vivid colours of early childhood, recurring dreams, there blurry way we see things when we are either too happy or too sad, and the soft hands of the high renaissance.

• 

For me, Elle truly captures the idealistic perception of not wanting to grow up, and finding it hard to let go of familiar things and simply having to deal with change – regardless of wether the changes are positive or negative. Her images create compelling perceptions of nostalgia, almost as if she’s yearning for the emotions she felt in the times she’s documented. This is shown through dream like imagery she creates, using warm, muted colours mixed with pastel palettes and incorporating surrealist elements into her works.

Katrien de Blauwer was born in the small provincial town of Ronse (Belgium). After a troubled childhood, She moved to Ghent at a young age to study painting. Later she attended the Royal Academy in Antwerp to study fashion. A study she abandoned. It was at that time she made her first collage books, actually studies and moodbooks for fashion collections. At a later age she began collecting, cutting and recycling images as therapeutic self investigation.

Her images consist of  mostly feminine figures which in turn makes her work somewhat of a feminist movement. As she created collages made up of found photographs and magazine cut outs, she took things that weren't her own, and for me and from my view of her work mirrors the early start of the Feminist movement; when women started to fight for their rights and take back what was rightfully theres from the patriarchy. 

DIRTY SCENES

In Dirty Scenes, pages are often overlaid with paint and crayon, disrupting the intimacy of the images. Although unspoken, the narrative seems to draw from the artist’s own life – her body, femininity and sexuality, as well as alluding to absent male figure and various other unknown female characters, creating a sense of unknown which viewers often perplexed and questioning. 

Anonymity is a central theme in de Blauwer’s work, she describes it as “an important part of the language”. “In Dirty Scenes, anonymity is prominent because this series deals with hidden anonymous encounters,” she says. By working this way, de Blauwer hopes that both herself – the artist – and the audience can appreciate the story and experience it in unison. “The viewers can identify with the intimate image or narrative due to becoming anonymous themselves, and eventually the story belongs to everyone. I’m acting as a neutral intermediary between the story of others and my own, I did not make these images, but I gave them a new life and meaning; I bring satires from others into my inner world and vice versa.”

Katrien De Blauwer calls herself a "photographer without a camera". She collects and recycles pictures and photos from old magazines and papers. Her work is, at the same time, intimate, directly corresponding with our unconscious, and anonymous thanks to the use of found images and body parts that have been cut away. This way, her personal history becomes the history of everyone. The collage effects a kind of universalisation, emphasizing the impossibility to identify with a single individual, yet allowing to recognize oneself in the story. The artist becomes a neutral intermediary: without being the author of the photographs, she appropriates and integrates them into her own interior world, a world she’s revealing in third person.

Dirty Scenes is an enhancement to Why I Hate Cars – a story where the male figure is focal yet not present. Here, contrastingly, the female subjects are in center, yet their appearances are deterred from view. As observed through the dream of a small girl, the subjects are situated such that hinders all feeling of character – maybe symbolizing naivety, an absence of comprehension, or a need to overlook the  situations occurring.

Either way, it’s widely known that art and creative techniques can act as a successful means of psychotherapy. De Blauwer compares her collage work to “visiting a therapist” – “I talk through my work.”
“As I age, my work is growing with me as I mature, and everything my work is trying to tell me is becoming clearer,” she says. “It’s a healing process; it’s a quest, and one that often confronts me with myself.”


MY OWN WORK AND RESPONSE

Below are three of my responses to Katrien de Blauwers series of photographs 'Intimate Abstract' which focuses on close up shots of female figures. It seems to be a common occurrence nowadays that males mostly dominate the world of such confidential female details in the art world, and so I found De Blauwers movement of work quite liberating in terms of exposing ourselves as women on our own, without men jeopardising our dignity for the sake of themselves. 

Us, as women, can choose wether we expose ourselves and our venerability or not. Men have no choice anymore. We have taken charge. 

The theme which I focus on in my personal study follows the odyssey of four feelings; change – euphoria – love – regret. For myself, the idea and concept of change has a journey – how change makes you feel euphoric, and you fall in love with your new life but may still suffer with the feelings of regret. Theres been many changes occurring in the past few years of my life, and its changed me as a person, ripped away any safety nets, and started building the person I am now at present. My personal study is going to document how change can affect you emotionally and spirituality as a person, specifically focusing on illness, divorce, loss, lack of love and the idea of rebuilding your so called normality all over again.

Lissy Elle is a young photographer who shoots in film and combines documentary photography with surrealist elements. Most of Elle’s projects and works have focused on her mentality in different stages and places of her life. When asked ‘What is the most important element about a photograph?’, she stated “An emotion, no matter how clichéd that might sound. You can always tell if someone created a piece from a technical place or an emotional place. You can do everything right in terms of lighting and composition and still make a flat and dull photograph. I want to see what you were feeling and what you were thinking and why I should care. If you don’t care then I don’t care.” (EZRAMAGAZINE.Bolger.2019:5) 

Historical and theoretical context

• if manipulation is the first thing someone thinks of in connection to photography, what does that say about the value of the photograph as a reflection of reality. (Bright and Van Erp 2019; 17)

Bibliography – Bright, S. and Van Era,H (2019) Photography Decoded. London: Octopus publishing house

• The daguerreotype had aspirations to both the realistic and the theatrical, as well as to the commercial. The ‘mirror’ can serve as a metaphor for reality, whereas the red velvet evokes theatre curtains, within which the beautiful drama would unfold. (Bright and Van Erp 2019; 17)

Bibliography – Bright, S. and Van Era,H (2019) Photography Decoded. London: Octopus publishing house