L'Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism

Much has been written about Surrealist painting and sculpture, but most of the erotic, disorienting and exquisite Surrealist photographs of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Andre Breton, Brassai, Salvador Dali, Andre Kertesz and Hans Bellmer have remained all but unknown - until now. Traditional criticism has viewed Surrealist photography as a pale imitiation of authentic Surrealist work. The assumption has been that photography, a realistic medium, is fundamentally incomptatible with a cause devoted to the wildly subjective, the world of dreams and the unconscious. As a consequence, Surrealist photography, a major body of 20-century art, has remained largely unexplored.