Photography and Surrealism

Reflecting on this week’s readings, I found Adorno’s concept of Surrealism and photography as mediums of denial to be an interesting point. In his Looking Back on Surrealism, Adorno likens photography to Surrealism to the extent that both have a complex relationship to time and history. To Adorno, both of these modes of expression capture a “freezing of the moment of awakening” (Adorno, 89), depicting not ahistorical objects of the unconscious but instead profoundly historical objects that have been removed from their original context and thus deprived of the meanings that used to be associated with them. To illustrate this, Adorno uses the example of a pornographic image, which changes its meaning at the moment the voyeur achieves gratification. At this historical instant, the image becomes devoid of its past meaning to the subject (as a sexual object) and ultimately gives way to meaninglessness. To Adorno, both Surrealist art and photography fundamentally exist and operate within this instant at which meaning is lost – stuck in an amorphous realm between present and past, linked to history and yet deeply ahistorical.

Adorno goes on to conclude that both photography and Surrealism are mediums of denial – denial of the urges, feelings, and meanings of the past that have now been replaced with the indifference of the present. This gives the works a sort of profound flatness, their depth only accessible through memories of feelings that no longer exist. Surrealism achieves this flatness through its complete disassociation of the object from its real-world context, displacing it completely and in turn dislocating it from its associations. In photography, it is the image’s complete spatial and temporal removal from that which it depicts that renders it meaningless.

Ultimately, it is the fact that both of these modes of expression, “salvage what is out of date” (Adorno, 90) that makes them so similar. The most important point in this quote to me is the choice of words – rather than reinterpret, remember, or make reference to what is out of date, photography and Surrealism “salvage” the past and show it in its most decontextualized form, providing the subject with a unique opportunity to “[become] aware that it is something external, an imitation of something social and historical” (Adorno, 89). Ultimately, it is this opportunity to reflect, remember, and ultimately deny history that links these two different forms of representation.