Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent - Softcover

David Bate

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1860643795 ISBN 13: 9781860643798

Publisher: Routledge, 2003

Synopsis

As "surreal" images become ever more common through the ease of computer manipulation, the place in history occupied by Surrealism and the Surrealists can easily be lost to sight. This challenging re-evaluation of the status and use of photographic images in historical Surrealism puts Surrealism's fundamental issues back into the framework of its historical purpose and function. David Bate examines automatism and the photographic image, the Surrealist passion for insanity, ambivalent use of Orientalism, use of Sadean philosophy and the effect of fascism of the Surrealists. The book is illustrated wtih a wide range of surrealist photographs.

About this title

About the Author:

David Bate is professor of photography at the University of Westminster, London, UK. His writings deal with the history, theory and criticism of photography, alongside his own photographic work.

Review:

""David Bate provides a rich feast of carefully researched insights into how photographers of the Breton Circle in Paris understood their activities as deeply socially transformative. This is a much-needed work of scholarly restoration, which reconnects surrealism with its own repressed histories as an instrumental practice of cultural and political resistance. This book is a welcome antidote to popular notions of Surrealism as apolitical 'shock art' or as phallocentric and sexually exploitive.""--Deborah Bright

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1860643795
• ISBN 13: 9781860643798
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 282