Photos from the British surrealist Penrose's travels, during 1938, from Greece through to Romania. This book is a facsimile of the book he made, upon his return to England, to document his trip-in part, a response to his fear that the cultures he had visited would soon disappear. Included with the photographs are texts from his travelogue, with type styles changing with each new thought.
This volume sets out to challenge and ultimately broaden the category of the ‘photobook’. It critiques the popular art-market definition of the photobook as simply a photographer’s book, proposing instead to show how books and photos come together as collective cultural productions. Focusing on North American, British and French photobooks from 1920 to the present, the chapters revisit canonical works – by Claudia Andujar and George Love, Mohamed Bourouissa, Walker Evans, Susan Meiselas and Roland Penrose – while also delving into institutional, digital and unrealised projects, illegal practices, DIY communities and the poetic impulse. They throw new light on the way that gendered, racial or colonial assumptions are resisted. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a better understanding of how the meaning of a photobook is collectively produced both inside and outside the art market.
This book was originally published in 1999, and is the first comprehensive study of the British surrealist movement and its achievements. Lavishly illustrated, the book provides a year-by-year narrative of the development of surrealism among artists, writers, critics and theorists in Britain. Surrealism was imported into Britain from France by pioneering little magazines. The 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London, put together by Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, marked the first attempt to introduce the concept to a wider public. Relations with the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War and World War Two fractured the nascent movement as writers and artists worked out their individual responses and struggled to earn a living in wartime. The book follows the story right through to the present day. Michael Remy draws on 20 years of studying British surrealism to provide this authoritative and biographically rich account, a major contribution to the understanding of the achievements of the artists and writers involved and their allegiance to this key twentieth-century movement.
Surrealism and Photography in Czechoslovakia: On the Needles of Days sheds much-needed light on the location of the greatest concentration of Surrealist photography and examines the culture and tradition within which it has taken root and flourished. The volume explores a rich and important artistic output, very little of which has been seen outside of its land of origin. Based on extensive research at museums in Prague and Brno and many conversations with participants in and historians of the movement, Krzysztof Fijalkowski, Michael Richardson and Ian Walker analyse how this photographic work has developed cohesively and rigorously, from the beginnings of Czech Surrealism in 1934, to the intriguing researches of the present-day Czech and Slovak Surrealist group by way of mysterious veiled responses to the repressive contexts with which they were faced from the 1950s to the 1980s. The main chapters, ordered chronologically, are intersected with shorter texts examining specific works. The reader will find in this volume images that present challenges to our understanding of how photographic work has been used within surrealism, pinpointing individual pictures whose dynamic charge may induce instants of compelling interrogation and disruption.
This collection of essays, inspired by André Breton's concept of the limites non-frontières of Surrealism, focuses on the crossings, intersections and margins of the surrealist movement rather than its divides and exclusion zones. Some of the essays originated as papers given at the colloquium 'Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers' held at the Institute of Romance Studies, University of London, in November 2001. Surrealism is foregrounded as a trajectory rather than a fixed body of doctrines, radically challenging the notion of frontiers. The essays explore real and imaginary journeys, as well as the urban dérives of the surrealists and situationists. The concept of crossing, central to a reading of the dynamics at work in Surrealism, is explored in studies of the surrealist object, which eludes or elides genres, and explorations of the shifting sites of identity, as in the work of Joyce Mansour or André Masson. Surrealism's engagement with frontiers is further investigated through a number of revealing cases, such as a political reading of 1930s photography, the parodic rewriting of the popular 'locked room' mystery, or the surrealists' cavalier redrawing of the map of the world. The essays contribute to our understanding of the diversity and dynamism of Surrealism as an international and interdisciplinary movement.
From amateur experiments in scrapbooks and stereographs to contemporary photobook collaborations between leading practitioners, poets and photographers have created an art form that continues to evolve and deserves critical exploration. Photopoetry 1845-2015, a Critical History represents the first account of this challenging and diverse body of work. Nott traces the development of photopoetic collaboration from its roots in 19th-century illustrative practices to the present day. Focusing on work from the UK and US, he examines how and why poets and photographers collaborate, and explores the currents of exchange and engagement between poems and photographs on the page. The book not only considers canonical figures, but brings to light forgotten practitioners whose work questioned and shaped the relationship between word and image. Photopoetry 1845-2015, a Critical History provides a new lens through which to explore poetry, photography, and the spaces between them.
