Photography and surrealism

A lm still (photograph) from Man Rays cinpome Emak-Bakia () published as a photograph in La Rvolution surraliste, in the centre of Andr Bretons essay, Le Surralisme et la peinture in La Rvolution surraliste, no. , October .
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Breton, Surrealism and Painting, p. .

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(rubbing) as a mechanical automatism invoked the distracted states of hysterics more than any mechanization of the process of making an image. In this respect distinctions between images produced as writing or visual were deeply obscured (or combined as in emblem theory) in surrealist theories of the image. Automatic writing could be visual, producing doodlelike abstract images with no obvious meaning or, equally, create images with words, as in Bretons example, using conventional symbolic language. Likewise, photograms (Man Rays eponymous Rayogram) written with light could be abstract with no obvious meaning or used to produce pictorial representations with imaginary referents. These could all be regarded as different yet equally valid modes for experimenting with psychic automatist production, irrespective of the intelligibility of the results as having a message or meaning.