Adorno's Surrealism, Photography, and the Aura

In “Looking Back on Surrealism,” Adorno posits that the effect of surrealist art lies in its recollection of images that are “festishes … on which something subjective, the libido, was once fixated” (89). I think he means to point out that these images refer to collective fetishes, created by collective childhood experiences. The affective part of surrealist art is the tension between the familiarity of the images and their new context—he likens it to psychoanalysis in its “attempt to uncover childhood experiences by means of explosion” (88).

Adorno’s relation of surrealism to photography is especially interesting. He writes that, inasmuch as they are both “a freezing of the moment of awakening, surrealism is akin to photography” (89). Though I think I understand, to a certain extent, what this means in terms of his conception of photography (something like the sensation of waking up and remembering dream-objects but not knowing immediately why they are familiar or where they came from? Or maybe this is very wrong—he does argue against the association of surrealism with actual dreams.), I am having trouble articulating to myself how photography might be conceptualized as a “freezing of the moment of awakening.”

It occurs to me that the photographic image’s relation to surrealism might have be connected somehow to Benjamin’s notion of the aura. In the same way that photography, in its inherent reproducibility, looses the aura of existing only in a unique time-space, the images of surrealism also loose aura by disrupting temporal experience in their confusing reminder of an external and historical fixation.