The Uncanny and the Surreal in Urban Photography

September 16, 2012 · by jackr541986Bohn (1977, p. 206) argues, it is not by chance that we find in surrealist art a particular interest in, “metaphors which permit the extension of ourselves into another world”. The images of a window, door or lens providing access to a new world also gives us the key to understanding Breton’s surrealism as precisely the breakdown of the conventional associations of conscious thought which affords access to the Marvelous and the new. Insofar as urban photography adopts and extends the surrealist visual practices, we can consider its particular aesthetic to be intelligible through recourse to the theories and concepts offered by surrealism. Prevalent trends in contemporary urban photography (but which can be also traced back to the early pioneers such as Brassaï) reflect the artists concern with the strangeness, the chance encounter, even the obscene, as woven into the fabric of the city. The distillation of these features not only brings out the disturbing quality in a mundane object, but also shatters the city as the neutral background of the subject’s daily life.

It’s worthwhile pausing for a moment to explore the relationship between surrealism and psychoanalysis which is evident in Breton’s use of the term ‘unconscious’. While it is clear that these two movements followed different tangents in many respects the relationship between them can be understood through reference to the concept of the unconscious as well as that of the ‘uncanny.’ In his essay, ‘The “Uncanny”’, Freud (1919, p. 2) defines the concept as, “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”. Further on, this definition is extended through Freud’s reference to Shelling’s definition of the uncanny, “as something which ought to have been kept concealed but which has nevertheless come to light” (1919, p. 13). The surrealist effort to discern the dimension of the Marvelous in the ordinary objects of everyday life is clearly based on this twofold concept of the uncanny. The uncanny is, then, an aspect whose concealment allows ordinary life to continue undisturbed, and whose revelation can represent a shock or rupture, and yet it is also co-substantial with the subject’s perception of an object or participation in an event. The unconscious is crucial here, distorting the ‘known’ object, rendering it in such a way that it stirs up the experience of terror in the subject. Such a ‘terrifying’ experience should be understood in its broadest sense, encompassing feelings of awe, arousal, confusion, perhaps even disgust. Following Stamelman (2006, p. 73), we can say that reality, “has its own unconscious, an as-yet unrevealed underside”. The surrealist project can thus be understood as one of attempting to liberate the unconscious from the fetters of convention in order to explore reality in its hidden, uncanny dimension.

In City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in the Interwar Years, Ian Walker (2002) draws attention to a particular feature of Breton’s own photography which can be said to centre on a key motif of later street photography. Walker (2002, p. 55), discussing Breton’s Nadja, states: “Produced in quite different ways, the postcard and the snapshot have in common the quality of a talisman. Even when they are pictorially of little interest, they can carry great personal resonance, replete with memories, associations and desires.” The simple image of an everyday object or place, viewed through the surrealist lens, is elevated precisely insofar as it initially appears as commonplace. It is this elevation of the ‘everyday’ which Walter Benjamin (1978, p. 183) wishes to convey when he notes the strange intervention of

photography as the injection of a “pristine intensity”. Deprived of all contextual and narrative support, the object is able to reach beyond its natural parameters and evoke an unexpected response in the viewer. Thus for Breton, it is the objects aesthetic inadequacy which paradoxically allows the viewer to perceive its beauty. Insofar as the operation involves extracting the photographed object from its contextual embeddedness and depriving it of narrative support, we can conceive this kind of street photography in terms of rupture. The object which once constituted part of the neutral backdrop to our lives is suddenly torn out of place and revealed as pregnant with meaning.A further way in which it is possible to detect a surrealist inheritance in the works of street photographers can be noted by observing the ways in which a particular composition of a scene can suggest unexpected qualities. Here it is useful to turn to the work of Brassaï whose images of Paris often encourage ghostly, even Gothic associations.[1] A key example of the surrealist import can be found in the photograph “Open Gutter” (see fig 1.) from Paris by Night (1933). The image of a gutter shown weaving through the streets of Paris, shot from a particular angle, suddenly strikes the observer as possessing an organic quality, as if the thing itself were animated and only glimpsed by chance. Under this interpretation, the cobble stones which line the gutter also appear to suggest the alignment of a snake’s vertebrae as it slithers between the patches of darkness. The image can be considered uncanny in the precise sense elaborated by Freud since it reveals a disturbing, even terrifying dimension in a well-known object. Likewise, this object, which contributes to the background of so many city-dwellers urban experience, is now thrown into sharp relief. In Brassaï’s photograph the gutter is violently dislodged from its surroundings so that it suddenly appears to possess an alien quality. Such a quality is a product of the observer’s libidinal relationship to the object, which, during his daily activity must remain suspended in the unconscious.

Fig. 1

To shift focus towards the surrealist inheritance in contemporary urban photography, it is instructive to turn to the collection of photographs entitled Cardiff After Dark (2010) by Maciej Dakowicz. These images strike us initially as journalistic pictures documenting the drinking culture of young people in Cardiff. Nevertheless, even from

this unlikely source material, it is possible to detect the influence of the surrealist movement. Indeed, it is possible to borrow Brassaï’s phase (1949, p. 13) and note in Dakowicz an attempt to seize, “the reality of every day so intensely that he achieves fantasy at one bound”. As the viewer progresses through the collection, she is confronted with a series of images which evoke the uncanny through reference to motifs such as decapitation, contortionism and orgiastic jouissance. In one example, multiple legs appear to emerge from a single body, whilst in another, a single leg remains perched on a plastic bollard. One is immediately drawn towards the uncanny quality, noted Slavoj Žižek, of the limb without a body. If, siding with Žižek (2008, p. 223), we view the obscene jouissance displayed in Dakowicz’s photographs as that which, “resists symbolization and causes gaps and ruptures in the symbolic order”, then the partial object (the limb, the decapitated body, and so on) acts as a kind of stand in for the traumatic Thing (jouissance) which can never be rendered present. In these images of hedonistic indulgence, it is almost as if the severed limbs persist in their pursuit of enjoyment long after the body’s chaotic disintegration. In doing so, they render the scene’s jouissance fully palpable.Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter (1978) Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York.Brassaï (1933) “Open Gutter” from Paris by Night Image available at:http://www.masters-of-photography.com/B/brassai/brassai_gutter.html. Accessed at 17:38, 25/01/11Brassaï (1949) Camera in Paris. London: The Focal Press.Dakowicz, Maciej (2010) Cardiff After Dark. Image available at:http://www.maciejdakowicz.com/. Accessed at 17:05, 25/01/11.Freud, Sigmund (1919) ‘The “Uncanny”’, p. 2. Online version available:http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf. Accessed at 13:58, 25/01/11Krauss, Rosalind (1981) The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.October, Vol. 19 (Winter), pp. 3-34Stamelman, Richard (2006) “Photography: The Marvelous Precipitate of Desire”. Yale French Studies, No. 109, (Surrealism and Its Others), pp. 67-81Walker, Ian (2002) City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in the Interwar Years. Manchester: Manchester University PressBohn, Willard (1977) “From Surrealism to Surrealism: Apollinaire and Breton”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Winter), pp. 197-210Žižek, Slavoj (2008) The Plague of Fantasies. 2nd ed. London: Verso

[1] Also see Ian Walker’s account of Brassaï’s relationship with surrealism in his (2002) City Gorged with Dreams: Surrealism and Documentary Photography in the Interwar Years (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 144-65