John Tagg
[Writer, theorist, and photohistorian, b. 1949, North Shields, England, lives in Ithica, New York.]
I look at an image and it is flooded with a half-forgotten dream, bulking out its figures with the forms of desire, opening up its vistas to a physically sensed space and presence.
W.G Sebald
[Writer, b. 1944, Bavaria, Germany, d. 2001, East Anglia, England.]
In my photographic work I was always especially entranced... by the moment when the shadows of reality, so to speak, emerge out of nothing on the exposed paper, as memories do in the middle of the night, darkening again if you try to cling to them.
Salvador Dali (Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech, Marquis of Pubol)
[Artist, b. 1904, Figueres, Catalonia, Spain, d. 1989, Figueres, Spain.]
Photographic data... is still and ESSENTIALLY THE SAFEST POETIC MEDIUM and the most agile process for catching the most delicate osmoses which exist between reality and surreality. The mere fact of photographic transposition means a total invention: the capture of a secret reality.
Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
I would photograph an idea rather than an object, a dream rather than an idea.
Kansuke Yamagata
[Photographer and poet, b. 1914, Nagoya, Japan, d. 1987, Nagoya.]
The surreal exists within the real. Tireless experimentation with new photography leads to the creation of a new beauty.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision.
Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
Surreality lies within ourselves, in objects that have become banal because we no longer see them, in the
normality of the normal.
The ‘Surrealism’ of my images was just reality itself, but made Fantastic through vision.
