Research Point: Surrealist Connections.
To tackle this exercise I made a grid with the names of twenty one artists along one one axis and a list of thirteen attributable qualities or features on the second axis. This second list developed as I worked.
My starting point was to look at the definition of surrealism. The Tate defines it as:
Surrealism was a movement which began in the 1920s of writers and artists who experimented with ways of unleashing the subconscious imagination. In line with the exercise I have kept in the five photographers working before this time.
Three names were removed as they were more archivists that artists in their own right. This left me with eighteen photographers.
I spent two days looking at their work, not in detail, but looking for overall patterns in their work. The result of this is the following list.
- Stark 11.
- Bleak 9.
- Urban 13.
- Not populated 4.
- Populated 10.
- Head on 9.
- Angled 10.
- Architectural 10.
- Camera effects 7.
- Dark room effects 3.
- Rural 2.
- Control of subject 9.
- Intrusive 3.
Before I stared this exercise I would have interchange the words bleak and stark but as I worked through the images I could discern a difference. The Free Dictionary supplies the following:
Stark:
Bare, desolate, or unadorned.
Bleak:
Providing no encouragement; depressing.
My reading of this is that a stark view can offer hope but a bleak view offers no hope.
This was not intended as a detailed look at the work of the photographers mentioned in Canon Fodder, but the overall impression one gets when confronted by a body of their photographs.
References:
[Accessed: 11th. August 2015].
http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/surrealism
[Accessed: 11th. August 2015].
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