City gorged with dreams: Surrealism and documentary photography in interwar Paris.

By Ian Walker
Manchester University Press Manchester and New York 2002
227 pages 72 black and white illustrations
ISBN 0 7190 6214 4 hardback =A349.99
ISBN 0 7190 6215 2 paperback =A317.99

Reviewed By Susan Taylor
Goldsmiths' College
University of London

This book has as its sub-title 'Surrealism and documentary photography in
interwar Paris'. It is based in a survey of aspects of Surrealism which
engaged with both the notions of documentary and photographs which were made as documentation. The survey first looks at surrealist texts from the 1920' which used writing in specific conjunctions with photographs: they were
published in surrealist reviews and journals. 'Texts' (photographs and
writing) were employed that embodied surrealist principles of strangeness
and which, in juxtaposition with the other 'text', further estranged the
possible readings. Ian Walker's exposition of particular uses of images
(Boiffard, Atget etc) within the space of the pages of surrealist publications, and in relation to the the text's language and fragmented narrative is subtly extrapolated. The 'offsetting' of the two, 'writing' across each other, is argued as intending to undermine pre-formed ideas, seeking to position personal seeing in conjunction with 'external' reality as in some way revelatory (but not transcendental). The aspiration in surreal thinking was towards the political and against static and materialist modes of social organisation and perception.

There has been much (recent) writing about surrealism and photography.
Walker notes that this writing has not considered a discussion about the
specific and self-conscious use by surrealists of documentary (or the real,
or the found) in both writing and photography. (It has primarily dealt with
the 'constructed' image). Documentation was not sought by the surrealists as
a 'truth': they were concerned with strangeness and estrangement as
embodiments of the 'marvellous' in the 'everyday'. Two thirds of the way
through, the discussion moves to looking at photographers who were
associated with Surrealism (in particular Brassai and Henri Cartier-Bresson)
and whose 'surrealism' occurs within the photographic image alone. There is
discussion of the changing role of the 'strange-in-the-everyday' within
these photographers' work. Finally the book looks at 'surrealist anthropology' in Michel Leiris' work. In his work surreality does not overtly exist in the (anthropological/documentary) photographs alone but is implied in the nature of the text placed next to them. These texts confounda 'straight' anthropological reading of the image by providing an 'anthropology' of the self (who observes).

Near the beginning of the book Ian Walker states that he is cautious about
viewing the past with 'present' eyes. However, a book like this will always
be a meeting point between an attempt to understand a past history in its
own terms and a sense of (renewed) retrieval using a 'present' understanding
that has evolved since that history was made, and which is inflected within
that very history. In fact there is no 'knowing' of the past - nor of the present - and our partial views of the past are firmly embedded in present concerns. This book re-evokes in an intelligible and accessible way aspects of the surrealist past that reverberate with present contemporary interests. Not least of these is in notions of interdisciplinarity.

In some ways all of photography, as an indexical medium, is being discussed
in this book, through the particularity of Surrealism's uses of it. It now
seems easier to say that all photographs are constructed to different
degrees, and for different purposes, and that documentary has become a
cultural term applied through the intentions for the work made.
Surrealism sought to de-stabilize certain assumed ways of seeing, but it did
not wish to literally describe. This was considered to have a political,
even revolutionary potential for the individual. Writing was also
problematised as being between the 'real world' and the personal by
collageing fantasy/fiction/observational/diaristic/journalistic/'scientific'
and informational modes. Ultimately Andre Breton's own interests were in
text and language. His interest in photography was partial: through it he
sought indexicality, 'uncanniness', a supposed rhetoric of authentication,
an undermining of expressiveness. Surrealism desired the 'marvellous' as a
way of perception and being, offering a performative as a way of negotiating
the city (the city as metaphor for modernity).

The 'in-betweenness' of photographic Surrealism's use of both indexicality
and constructedness within the same image; notions of the 'real', the
flaneur and the city; magazine publication and materiality; spectacle are
all (inevitable) aspects for discussion in this interesting book. Like
the juxtapositions it enumerates in surrealist texts/publications
themselves the book could be seen to be a slightly awkward collection of
research aspects on Surrealism. This 'awkwardness', however, has its own
rewards: it 'opens up' a historical subject which can easily be presented as
closed in its relevance to contemporary concerns and practices. Ian Walker
leaves a space to be continued for future development, through his careful
'readings' and insights across the well-known facts and through a diverse,
even eclectic grouping of subjects in the text. Given the style and
fascination of the book such a development is a pleasant prospect.