Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world and instead propose that we collect it.
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
To convulse reality from within, to demonstrate it as fractured spacing, became the collective result of all that vast range of techniques to which surrealist photographers resorted and which they understood as producing the characteristics of the sign.
Imogen Cunningham
[Photographer, b. 1883, Portland, d. 1976, San Francisco.]
The imaginative photographer is always dreaming and trying to record his dream.
Douglas McCulloh
[Photographer, b. 1959, Los Angeles, lives in Los Angeles.]
Photography has a natural affinity for the strategies of surrealism—the exaltation of chance and eros, the exploration of obsession and the release of the unconscious.
André Breton
[Artist, writer, editor, and critic, b. 1896, Tinchebray, France, d. 1966, Paris, France.]
I am sorry not to be able to reproduce, among the illustrations to this text, a photograph of a very handsome locomotive after it had been abandoned for many years to the delirium of a virgin forest.
James Joyce
[Writer, b. 1882, Rathgar, Ireland, d. 1941, Zurich, Switzerland.]
...Ill make him feel all over him till he half faints under me then hell write about me lover and mistress publicly too with our 2 photographs in all the papers when he becomes famous...
Rosalind Krauss
[Writer, critic, and historian, b. 1941, Washington, D.C., lives in New York.]
If we are to generalize the aesthetic of surrealism, the concept of Convulsive Beauty is at the core of that aesthetic: reducing to an experience of reality transformed into a representation. Surreality is, we could say, nature convulsed into a kind of writing. The special access that photography has to this experience is its privileged connection to the real.
Susan Sontag
[Writer, theorist, and critic, b. 1933, New York, d. 2004, New York.]
What could be more surreal than an object... whose beauty, fantastic disclosures, emotional weight are likely to be further enhanced by any accidents that might befall it? It is photography that has best shown how to juxtapose the sewing machine and the umbrella, whose fortuitous encounter was hailed by a great Surrealist poet as an epitome of the beautiful.
