Oneiric Effects in Photography

by

Olga Tjukova

10010646

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of therequirements for the degree of BA

(Hons) in Photography and Film

School of Arts and Creative Industries

Edinburgh Napier University

{20, December, 2013}

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my dissertation tutor Dr. Louise Milne for inspiration and guidance.

ii

Abstract

I examine how oneiric effects in photography may be

achieved, because representation of alternative states of

consciousness is part of every culture and is omnipresent in

contemporary and ancient imagery. Such images have similar

visual structures - reoccurring elements and tools used to

transmit such states can be noticed and grouped.

I briefly consider the histories of photography,

histories of concepts of Realism and the notion of the Occult.

By combining ideas from Freud’s notion of dream-work and

semiotics I outline conventions of dream-like effects in

visual arts that have formed and accumulated over

generations. I pay special attention to Surrealism (and

Rosalind Krauss essays on the topic) as this artistic

tradition is based on Freudian concepts (psychic automatism in

particular); surreal photographers enriched photographic

language through their efforts to visualise the unconscious.

Alfred Gell’s definition of Occult is linked to the notion of

unconscious, and it is possible to notice some similarities

between rituals, dreams and artistic practices. I touch upon

some conventions of nightmares, bringing arguments by Laura

Mulvey and Linda Nochlin about defragmentation and

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dismemberment of the body in visual imagery, as the body is a

common medium to present the states of mind, social unease and

transmit a feeling of changing times. Throughout my reasoning

I revise some examples of Renaissance paintings, surrealist

works, and contemporary photography from different contexts in

order to illustrate how such effects may be constructed.

Dream is a leakage of unconscious material to conscious,

marked by condensation and displacement - workings of dream-

work, described by Freud; manifest content can be interpreted

to get access to hidden, latent content. Representing the

Real itself is problematic, as it is impossible to integrate

into the symbolic order without reduction following Jacque

Lacan, but there are codes of realism in arts. When codes of

realism are broken or distorted, oneiric effects occur.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements............................................iiAbstract...................................................iiiList of Figures.............................................viIntroduction.................................................1Chapter 1 – Reality and photography..........................21.1 How to picture the real?................................21.2 Heart of the photographic enterprise..................5

Chapter 2 – Semiotics of Dreams..............................92.1 Dream Interpretation...................................92.2 Freud’s dream-work and later development............11

2.2 Semiotics..............................................152.3 Surrealism.............................................182.4 The occult.............................................21

Chapter 3 – Conventions of Dream-like in Photography........253.1 Defragmentation........................................263.2 Ethereality and mythic characters.....................293.3 On Colour..............................................313.4 Cloud convention and closed eyes......................333.5 On nightmares..........................................343.6 Place in contemporary art world.......................37

Conclusion..................................................39Figures.....................................................41

List of Figures

Fig. 1 Roger Ballen, Pielie pg 41Fig. 2 Brassaï. Graffiti de la Série V, Animaux: Chimère pg 41Fig. 3 Salvador Dali and Horst P. Horst, Costume

design for “The Dream of Venus”pg 41

Fig. 4 Hieronymus Bosch, The Trees Have Ears and theField Has Eyes

pg 41

Fig. 5 Caravaggio, Medusa pg 42Fig. 6 Edouard Manet, The Road-Menders, Rue de Berne pg 42Fig. 7 Reza Farazmand, Too Real pg 43Fig. 8 Joel-Peter Witkin, Invention of Milk pg 43Fig. 9 Alma Haser, Cosmic Surgery. Felix pg 43Fig.

10

Screenshot taken on November 2013 of Google Play search results for keywords “dream dictionary”

pg 44

Fig.

11

Anon., Untitled pg 44

Fig.

12

Alena Zhandarova, Cornflower tea and concealing chocolates

pg 44

Fig.

13

Man Ray, La Marquise Cassati pg 45

Fig.

14

Maurice Tabard, Study pg 45

Fig.

15

Noell S. Oszvald, Prejudice pg 45

Fig.

16

Anon., Untitled, LIFE Laughs Last, ed. Philip B. Kunhardt

pg 45

Fig.

17

Johan Renck, for Fever Ray pg 46

Fig.

18

Frank Buttenbender, IAMX in Electric Ballroom, London pg 46

Fig.

19

Markéta Luskačová, On Death And Horses And Other People

pg 46

Fig.

20

Nils Vilnis, Purgatory. Image Nr 10 pg 47

Fig.

21

Duane Michals, The Human Condition pg 47

Fig.

22

Brassaï, Untitled pg 48

Fig.

23

Hans Bellmer, Untitled, from La Poupée (The Doll) pg 48

Fig.

24

Elizaveta Porodina, Untitled pg 48

Fig.

25

Claude Cahun. Self Portrait (in robe with masks attached) pg 49

Fig.

26

Alex Grey, Ecstasy pg 49

Fig.

27

André Kertész, Distortion #147 pg 49

Fig.

28

Yves Tanguy, My Life, White and Black pg 49

Fig.

29

Julia Margaret Cameron, Mary Ryan with Photogram Frame of Plant Forms

pg 50

Fig.

30

Clarence Hudson White, The Pipes of Pan pg 50

Fig.

31

Google image search using keywords “Ophelia photography”, December 12, 2013

pg 50

Fig.

32

Nicola Formichetti and Nick Knight , #DIESELTRIBUTE campaign

pg 51

Fig.

33

Olivia Locher, In Dreams pg 51

Fig.

34

Anon., Untitled, c.2013 pg 51

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Fig.

35

Anon., Untitled, c.2013 pg 51

Fig.

36

Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights pg 52

Fig.

37

Dürer, Saint John devouring the Book pg 52

Fig.

38

Roy Lichtenstein, Thinking of him pg 52

Fig.

39

Porter Mason, Who am I on the phone with? pg 53

Fig.

40

William Henry Fox Talbot, A Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbrellifer

pg 53

Fig.

41

Philippe Halsman, Dali Skull pg 53

Fig.

42

Cindy Sherman, Untitled #250 pg 53

Fig.

43

Germaine Advertising Agency for World Wide Fundfor Nature (WWF)

pg 54

Fig.

44

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled pg 54

Fig.

45

Antony Crossfield, Foreign Body 2 pg 54

Fig.

46

Tejal Patni for fashion brand Splash pg 54

Fig.

47

Serviceplan for Faber-Castell pg 55

Fig.

48

Viviane Sassen, Flamboya / Mirrorman pg 55

Fig.

49

Elizaveta Porodina, Untitled pg 55

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Introduction

When I first saw the music video clip that the

photographer Roger Ballen directed for DIE ANTWOORD for their

song called “I FINK U FREEKY', I was thrilled and amused. The

world constructed and captured was far away from normal and

mundane, from what I am used to perceive (both visually and

audibly) - it was mesmerizing and fresh. The video went viral

and was numerously re-posted on social networks (original

video1 hit 39 million views on youtube.com in December 2013),

proving the intense public interest. Also, the artist produced

a series of photographs taken during the video shoot (one of

them is seen above, Fig.1), and published them as a book.

This work sparked my interest in Roger Ballen’s

photography in particular, in the concept and history of the

surreal (the term surreal originally means “above realism”)

and their application in the contemporary art world. So how

are dream-like effects constructed in photography and why do

they still have a particular impact on viewers?

In order to understand it, I examine the topic in three

parts. In Chapter 1 – Reality and Photography, I talk about histories

of photography, and tight relationship photography has to

1 'I FINK U FREEKY' by DIE ANTWOORD, accessed December 13, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Uee_mcxvrw.

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reality. I introduce the notion of the Real and how it gains

traumatic quality. Then I discuss the notion of realism and

codes of realism in arts. In Chapter 2 – Semiotics of Dreams I

briefly introduce histories of dream interpretation, and look

at Freudian concept of dreamwork in more detail. I also bring

up semiotics, and then discuss how Surrealism can be

understood through this method of analysis. I look at

surrealists to discuss photography and its language. In Chapter

3 – Conventions of Dream-like in Photography I look more closely at

specific effects and tools in visualising the unconscious in

photography, where my last subsection is devoted to oneiric

effects in contemporary photography.

Chapter 1 – Reality and photography

1.1 How to picture the real?

“…the real goal of the marvellous journey is the total exploration of universalreality.” Pierre Mabille 2

To understand what is surreal or unreal, we must sort

out what is the real first. Direct experience or perception is

first restricted by viewer’s biology and psychology, and then

gains traumatic quality in the process of entering the 2 Pierre Mabille, Le miroir du merveilleux (préface d’André Breton, Sagittaire, Paris, 1940) as quoted in Tzvetan Todorov. "Chapter 3: The Uncanny and The Marvelous," in The Fantastic; a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1973), 57.

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symbolic order and representation. Nevertheless, there are

established codes of realism within visual arts, which make

imagery more or less plausible.

Question of the real is of an interest from different

perspectives – anthropological, psychological, philosophic,

artistic, etc. Along with the imaginary, the delusional,

false, fictional and abstract, dreams are often contrasted to

ideas about the real. The real is defined by actually “existing

as a thing or occurring in fact; not imagined or supposed”

(OED). But we are restricted (and/or blessed) by partial

world experience –our five senses. Therefore we are far away

from grasping the world in its totality; for example, we don’t

see ultraviolet and infra-red spectrums, our olfaction is very

basic compared to some animals, we can’t easily master

echolocation and don’t feel magnetic or electric fields,

etc.). Therefore, our human reality already has limited

perceptual relation to absolute objective reality.

Moreover, real does not always equal material, as it does

not always refer to physical surface. According to Raymond

Williams , “there are many real forces - from inner feelings

to underlying social and historical movements - which are

either not accessible to ordinary observation or which are

imperfectly or not at all represented in how things appear, so

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that a realism ‘of the surface’ can quite miss important

realities”.3 It gets more complicated in intellectual or

emotional domain – for example, when people with different

backgrounds and mind-sets are trying to establish any sort of

truth.

Does real have anything to do with being conscious about

it? Even while awake, it is impossible to be constantly aware

of surroundings – we “slip” into daydreaming, or get pre-

occupied with thought whirlpools. We cannot always, or for

very long, channel our attention, but we have an ability to

focus to different needs according to situation. And vice-

versa, it is also possible to be conscious about the dream –

so called lucid dreaming. While in a lucid dream, it feels

like a person can model or evoke any desired situation he

wants and experience it even on sensory level; see also other

metachoric experiences such as out-of-the-body experiences and

false awakenings4.

The Real for Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst and

psychiatrist, is the state of nature (libidinal life of the

3 Raymond Williams, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 260.4 Jayne Gackenbach, “Interview with Celia Green, author of the 1968 classic, ‘Lucid Dreams’," Lucidity Letter Issue, McEwan University Library,1989, accessed December, 8, 2013, http://library.macewan.ca/lucidity/LL%208(2)%20dec%2089/GREEN082.W50.htm.

4

body) from which we have been forever separated by our

entrance into language, and it works in tension with the

imaginary order and the symbolic order. Lacan thought that

three dimensions – language (and laws of kinship and social

order, referred to Symbolic order), the visual image (of

oneself, Imaginary order) and the body (the Real) – are bound

together to give our lives a sense of stability and establish

our basic sense of reality5. In the process of signification

the symbolic introduces "a cut in the real" - "it is the world

of words that creates the world of things."6

Bearing all these nuances in mind, is it possible to

represent the real? According to Lacan, the real is not only

opposed to the Imaginary, but is also impossible, because it

is impossible to integrate into the symbolic order without

reduction - this is how real is acquiring traumatic quality.

Daniel Leader in his book What is madness? brings in Lévi-

Strauss’s comparison of the entrance into symbolic order with

the utensil used to cut potatoes into chips – this is like “a

preconceived grid which can be applied to all empirical

situations, so that the resulting elements will all preserve

5 Darian Leader, What is madness? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2011), 44-45.6 Jacques Lacan, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis." in Écrits: a Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 65.

5

certain general qualities” 7. Lévi-Strauss called this process

‘an impoverishment’, because it introduces the discontinuities

to the world “where no such contrasts may necessarily exist,

and through this process, our reality becomes meaningful and

differentiated” 8. Therefore, it is impossible to represent

the real, but it is possible to trace codes of realism in arts.

Realism is a word that changed massively since 19

century. In philosophy, realism is the belief that reality

exists independently of the observer and his/hers conceptual

schemes, life experience, upbringing, mood etc. But Realism in

art and literature is both a method and a general attitude:

according to Raymond Williams, “as the latter it is

distinguished from Romanticism or from Imaginary or Mythical

subjects; things not of the real world. The use to describe a

method is often a term of praise - the characters, objects,

actions, situations are realistically described; that is, they

are lifelike in description or appearance; they show

realism.”9 So, for example, Medusa as a mythical character

can be represented in realistic manner (Fig. 5), and vice-

versa, mundane scenery, such as city traffic, can be depicted

in impressionistic manner (Fig.6). Realists must make the 7 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind. (London: Weidenfeld, 1966), as quoted in Leader. What is madness?, 51.8 Leader. What is madness?, 51.9 Raymond Williams, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 260.

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inanimate look animate, using and amending acquired codes of

dramatization and abstraction, distance, perspective and

volume of this particular artistic convention. One graphical

representation of this idea is shown quite sharply in Fig.7.

One of comments for this comic strip which I found

online is a suggestion for a “Bonus Comic: Instead of a

drawing he turns into a photo, the other guy explodes”, so it

is possible to distinguish “levels” of realism within visual

modes of presentation – so some pictures are more plausible

about actual happening, then others, and photography is often

perceived as being more realistic then drawing.

1.2 Heart of the photographic enterprise

Photography crystallised at a time when ideas of

positivism10 were flourishing and it was initially seen as a

perfect tool for surface studying. Initially photography was

discussed as a nature's device to reproduce itself - "pencil

of nature" as inventor and photography pioneer Talbot Fox

called it. In many contexts, despite its constructed nature,

photography replaced painting in its function of realist

visual representation- it was frequently used as evidence, or

10 Positivism - a philosophical system recognizing only that which canbe scientifically verified or which is capable of logical or mathematical proof, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism. (OED).

7

document for anthropological, architectural, medical, criminal

and other purposes. Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1859 called

photograph "a mirror with a memory"11 - and technically it is

a captured light (on film or digital sensor) reflected from

the object in reality. Semiology implies that “photograph

carries its own referent”, i.e. it is indexical, meaning that

it bears a causal relationship between object in the world and

signifier – like a weathercock, fingerprint, rings of water12.

Rosalind Krauss noticed that “on the family tree of images it

[photograph] is closer to palm prints, death masks, cast

shadows, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on

beaches”13. Throughout the history of photography many critics

noticed this tight relation photography has to reality and

named it differently – ‘mechanical reproduction’ by André

Bazin, ‘automatism’ by Stanley Cavell, ‘casual process’ by

Roger Scruton, ‘the ‘mechanical’ or ‘automatic’ model by Joel

Snyder, a ‘trace’ by Gregory Currie, ‘a special connection

with reality’ by Barbara Savedoff, and ‘objectivity’ by Scott

11 Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph”, The Atlantic Monthly, 6 (1859), accessed October 1, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1859/06/the-stereoscope-and-the-stereograph/303361/.12 Based on my essay Why is an understanding of the concepts of both Realism and Modernism essential to an understanding of photography?, Edinburgh Napier University, 2012.13 Rosalind E. Krauss, L'amour fou: photography & surrealism (London: Arts Council, 1985), 31.

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Walden14. Walden then states, that the epistemic advantage of

photographs over “handmade” images is not always absolute, but

it is often quite substantial.

Exactly this seemingly tight relation of photography and

reality explains how and why the effect of uncanny might be

created. On one level, if the picture is disturbing,

provocative, shocking, or in any other ways is not meeting

viewer’s expectations – the fact that the pictured scene seems

to have existed in front of the lens, in reality, might have a

particularly shattering aesthetic effect. Tzvetan Todorov15

discussed this (in regards to literary genres though) in

detail. He argued that the fantastic is located on the frontier

of two genres – the marvellous and the uncanny and lasts only as

long as a certain hesitation. In the uncanny, the laws of

nature must remain intact in order to provide an explanation

for described events (“supernatural explained”), whereas in

the marvellous, the reader has to propose new laws in order to 14 André Bazin in What is cinema? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 12; Stanley Cavell in The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1979); Roger Scruton in ‘Photography and Representation’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 7 (1981),103; Joel Snyder on ‘Photography and Ontology’, in J.Margolis (ed.), The Worlds of Art and the World (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1984), 24; Gregory Currie in ‘Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol.57, no.3 (1999), 286; Barbara Savedoff in Transforming Images: How PhotographyComplicates the Picture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell U.P., 2000), 8. As quoted in Scott Walden, "Objectivity in Photography." British Journalof Aesthetics 45, no. 3, (2005), accessed October 28, 2013, http://bjaesthetics.oxfordjournals.org/content/45/3/258.full.pdf.15 Todorov, Chapter 3: The Uncanny And The Marvelous, 57

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grasp the fantastic (supernatural accepted). We can link this

idea with the urge to know how an apparently uncanny or

impossible image in the photograph is constructed, how the

effect was achieved, and here lies the cause of reluctance of

some artists not to disclose this information, as the magic

explained may lose its charms and allure. This effect has a

great impact, for example, in Joel-Peter Witkin works, which

may shock with its abnormal models, dark and explicit imagery

(Fig. 8). On more subtle level, the very idea of photography,

a replica of the world might seem strange, as Susan Sontag put

it:

Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation ofa duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision. Susan Sontag16

This effect is widely used by photographers themselves,

who include other photographs into their work. In two

dimensional world of picture plane, another photographic image

is embedded in the composition of the primary one might seem

as ‘real’ and volumetric as the latter. This device clearly

plays significant part in Cosmic Surgery series by Alma Haser,

and I will discuss it later in greater detail after

16 Susan Sontag, On photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 52.

10

introducing more tools for understanding this image (Fig.

9)17.

Photography was always applied within two areas of

knowledge - science and art. If film photographers rely on

mechanics, optics and chemistry, contemporary photographer

working with digital needs to be computer literate and

experienced in editing software. But despite technical

changes, the core debate in photography hasn’t changed: in a

sense, all movements and paradigms can be divided into two big

sections - that is purist and pictorialist photography, or, in

more current terms - “straight” and manipulated photography.

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Paradigms of photography were born in the force field of

electric antagonism between realism and modernism - initially

as historical record, photographic interest then addressed

towards pictorialism to elevate photography to the level of

high art. Later, in search of autonomy from pictorial approach

(acquired from painting), photographers experimented with

forms and techniques (avant-garde/formalism), and then

interest returned to social problems (new realism and humanist

17 Please refer to 3.1 Defragmentation18 Tjukova, Why is an understanding of the concepts of both Realism and Modernism essential to an understanding of photography?, 2012

11

photography) with a new force and affirmed language. Alan

Sekula identified this misleading but popular antagonism as

"binary folklore" of art versus documentary19:

The opposition between these two poles are as follows: photographer as seer vs photographer as witness, photography as expression vs photography as reportage, theories of imagination (and inner truth) vs theories of empirical truth, affective value vs informative value, and finally, metaphoric signification vsmetonymic signification. Alan Sekula20

Although photography is still sometimes perceived as a

mere documenting tool, that has nothing to do with arts21, it

provides a vast range of possibilities to express concepts and

visions; and (maybe not to such extend as cinema), but it has

unique relation to representation of dreams. With all this

said, we find oneiric effects in photographic works of both

types.

19 Olga Tjukova, Why is an understanding of the concepts of both Realism and Modernism essential to an understanding of photography?, Edinburgh Napier University, 201220 Allan Sekula, On the Invention of Photographic Meaning, ed.Victor Burgin, Thinking Photography. (Macmillan, 1982), 108. 21 The Premier Online Debate Website, "Is photography art?, accessed December 15, 2013, http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-photography-art shows that 36% of respondents replied negatively.

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Chapter 2 – Semiotics of Dreams

2.1 Dream Interpretation

What actually means this word, oneiric? It derives from

Greek oneiros (dream) and means “of, characteristic of, or

relating to dreams; dreamlike.”(Oxford English Dictionary,

OED) This explanation reminds me of the term surreal which has

two definitions. First: “having the qualities of surrealist

art” (OED), the artistic movement emerged in France in mid

20s; and second: “above and beyond the real”22, or “bizarre,

dreamlike” (OED). I discuss how Surrealism contributed to the

arsenal of oneiric effects later. Here I am interested in the

visual vocabulary of rupture of unconscious which happens in

dreams, free association, hypnotic states, automatism, ecstasy

or delirium and in how these ideas inform the visual and are

expressed in particular kinds of art.

Dreams are interwoven in our lives in pre-linguistic

period, individual childhood and extra-linguistic culture.

Pre-linguistic period or childhood of humanity is manifested

in ancient imagery - mythic hybrid creatures. Individual

childhood is marked by tending to magic perception and pure

22 Allison Malafronte, "Reality and Imagination Converge at the Real/Surreal Exhibition in Texas," Fine Art Connoisseur, accessed November24, 2013,http://www.fineartconnoisseur.com/Reality-and-Imagination-Converge-at-the-Real-Surre/15847566.

13

imagination with misprisons and dramatization. Extra-

linguistic culture, as its name suggests, is outside the realm

of language, - it is the world of images, visions and

fantasies. 23

Throughout the centuries, concepts of dreams nature,

origin and significance have shifted, and each shift moved the

interpretation away from occult closer to psychological.

During Ancient times (in Mesopotamia, Babylon, Assyria and

Egypt) people believed in prophetic qualities of dreams and

their heavenly origin. First attempts to abandon this

religious-transcendental concept of dreams and move to

scientific explanation of phenomena took place in Ancient

Greece. For example, Pythagoras noticed that nightmares may be

caused by spoiled food; with this observation he moved the

dream interpretation towards somatic stimuli24; Aristotle

assigned dreams an internal psychological origin. Slightly

later Roman philosophers Lucretius and Cicero noticed that

dreams have psychological explanations – consisting of

23 Milne, Louise. “Chapter 1. The Image of the Metamorphic Body.” In Carnivals and Dreams: Pieter Bruegel and the History of the Imagination. London, Mutus Liber, 2007.

24 Christfried Togel. Traume - Phantasie und Wirklichkeit (Berlin: Dt. Verl. d. Wiss., 1987), accessed November 1, 2013, The Freud Museum, http://www.freud.org.uk/education/topic/10576/subtopic/40021/.

14

situations and ideas that preoccupy people in their waking

life. This idea is repeated constantly throughout the

centuries (e.g. Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems in the form of a

dream vision) and it is the main assumption in dream

interpretation resources. The seminal work on psychological

dream interpretation in Europe was done by Sigmund Freud in

his book The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).

Contemporary dream culture contains all these

contradictory currents – so, for example, a person can

verbalize his/hers dream as being both prophetic and having

grounds in his early childhood; encyclopaedia-type dream-

books, first appearing in Ancient Greece (Oneirocritica by

Artemidorus in the 2nd century AD) and then in Middle Ages,

are now presented in excess online and even as smartphone

applications (Fig. 10). In these resources, the

interpretation of dreams is reduced to symbolic

interpretations through analogies.

Let’s now go back to Freud and see into his key

definitions and ideas around dream interpretation.

2.2 Freud’s dream-work and later development

15

Freud is famous for developing the method known as

psychoanalysis for investigating and treating the mind, but

nowadays his writings are rarely studied by psychologists,

psychiatrist or medics. His ideas were mostly favoured (and I

mean widely applied) by cultural analysts and literature

scholars in particular25.

In his earlier division of the psyche, Freud

distinguished among different levels of awareness – conscious,

pre-conscious and unconscious. He described the conscious as a

part that deals with awareness of present feelings, thoughts,

and urges. The pre-conscious is related to data that can

readily be brought to consciousness – ordinary memory, and the

unconscious refers to data reserved which is outside of our

conscious awareness. These unconscious motivations and

memories are available to consciousness, but in disguised

form. Dreams and slips of the tongue, for instance, are

concealed examples of unconscious content getting out.

Nowadays, biopsychological explorations have confirmed many of

Freud’s insights about the topography of the psyche.26

25 Ritchie Robertson, Introduction, in Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxiv. 26 For example, Howard Shevrin, “Freud's theory of unconscious conflictlinked to anxiety symptoms in new U-M brain research,” University of Michigan Health SystemUofMHealth.org (12 June 2012), accessed December 13,2013, http://www.uofmhealth.org/news/unconscious-anxiety.

16

Freud also proposed to distinguish between two thinking

processes – primary and secondary. Primary process could be

called a “mythical thinking” and is marked by irrationality -

which denies facts and takes refuge in unrestricted fantasies.

Primary process is marked by regress from logic to images and

is dominant during the childhood. In the course of maturing,

we develop the secondary process, which is rational,

realistic, conscious thinking. This idea echoes pre-modern

division of mythos and logos, two ways of thinking, speaking,

and acquiring knowledge, recognized in Ancient Greece. Logos

was essential to the survival of humankind – this is a

pragmatic mode of thought which helped to organise households,

make weapons and plan war strategies. But it had its

limitations - it could not mitigate the grief for the lost

ones or answer questions about meaning of life and sustain

spiritual life. For that people turned to mythos or myth.27 In

Western culture, myths, which were initially transmitted

orally, then in print (adopted by writers in literature form),

are now (at least since 19th century) as art and philosophy,

through cinema, images and sound: “in mass-mediated society,

27 Karen Armstrong argues that myths are stories about gods and heroes, a primitive form of psychology in a sense, which were guidingpeople through life by giving examples and even programs of actions of moral behaviour. Karen Armstrong, “Introduction” in The case for God, 5-6 (New York: Knopf, 2009).

17

we huddle around movie screens instead of campfires for our

mythic tales.”28

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) introduces dream analysis.

Classic Freudian analysis reveals early sexual and instinctual

conflicts and desires. For Freud, dreams were "the royal road

to the Unconscious" and they are central to psychic life and

human culture. His more elaborate definition of the dream is

“disguised fulfilment of a repressed, infantile wish,

expressed as a hallucinatory experience in the course of

sleep”.

To interpret a dream means to uncover the latent content

based on the primary processes, while the secondary processes

of waking thought relates to the manifest content. The 'dream-

work', organized by processes of symbolization, is the system

of transformations which articulates these two levels

(manifest and latent content). Dreams are constructed out of

“day residues”, or distorted figments of memory. Dream

28 Grant, Barry Keith. "Screams on Screens: Paradigms of Horror," Thinking after Dark: Welcome to the World of Horror Video Games 4, no. 6 (2010): 2,accessed October, 13, http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/85.

18

interpretation process for Freud is a reverse of dream-work

and consists of discovering the mechanism of inner censorship

and dream-distortion applying the method of free association.

Freud distinguishes four methods of dream-distortions:

condensation, displacement, regression and secondary revision.

Condensation is manifested when a number of dream-elements

(themes, characters, ideas, objects) are combined into one, so

that the dream imagery becomes condensed. Displacement is a

defence mechanism in which there is an unconscious shift of

emotions, affect, or desires from the original object to a

more acceptable or immediate substitute. This is due to the

work of “censor of consciousness” - censorship, which becomes

part of psyche through upbringing and acquiring social taboos

and restrictions. ‘Regression’ is a process of converting

thoughts into images, perceptions, representations, e.g. a

person’s importance might be represented by their size, and

secondary revision ”with its snippets and scraps patches the

gaps in the dream-structure”29.

29 Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 319.

19

Freud’s methods of psychoanalysis and dream

interpretation have been criticized30 for falsification

(tendency to steer patients in the wanted direction), lacking

scientific evidence and healing progress, for subjective

gender bias and over-sexualisation. In his interpretations he

relied too much on word-play, underestimating visual imagery.

Moreover, Freud overlooked dreams which apparently restore

psychic balance (that was done later by Jung). Nevertheless,

Freud’s theory had a great impact on modern psychology, modern

intellectual paradigm and visual culture criticism. The

Interpretation of Dreams helped to develop hermeneutic principle

for literary study (it was especially rewarding in application

towards Gothic fiction, where surface realism is disrupted by

obscure terrors and obsessions). His ideas were also adopted

by post-structuralists. In 1957, Jacques Lacan, inspired by

an article by the linguist Roman Jakobson, argued31 that the

unconscious has the same structure of a language, and that

30 e.g. Crews, 1997; Grünbaum, 1993, Masson, 1984; Sulloway, 199231 Jaques Lacan, The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud, Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd Ed. Eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 447-461.

20

condensation and displacement are equivalent to the poetic

functions of metaphor and metonymy. Thus Lacan combined

Freud’s conception of the verbal character of unconscious

processes with structural linguistics.

Using Freudian theory for analysing cultural texts, one

has to avoid single-minded usage of psychoanalytic theory; by

underestimating formalist and social approaches analysis may

turn into illustration of the Freudian ideas. Analysis “is not

an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive

one, in search of meaning”32. The meaning of a dream and

artistic masterpiece is inexhaustible and depend on

interpreter. Freud’s terminology formed a vocabulary which

made a number of aspects of social life intelligible; he

transformed it into social text and his contemporary, Swiss

linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, supplied this text with

syntax. 33 Freudian ideas were picked up by Surrealists and

their approach to image producing. I look at this influence in

detail, but first I introduce semiotics as a tool to extract

meaning from the surrealist approach.

32 Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” In The Interpretation of Cultures (N.Y., Basic Books, 1977), 5.33 Ritchie Robertson, “Introduction” in Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p xxxv.

21

2.2 Semiotics

It is striking how ideas of latent and manifest content,

conscious and unconscious, patent and occult are apprehensible

in light of semiotics (and semiotics of photography in

particular). For a start, I consider some ideas from Roland

Barthes along with Umberto Eco, key figures in visual

semiotics analysis.

F. de Saussure proposed the idea of semiotics in 1916,

but first serious work on developing a systematic theory of

the ideology of photography with a help of study of sign

systems was made during 1960s and 1970s. Semiotics was used to

critique (by Roland Barthes, Victor Burgin, Umberto Eco)

realism as an aesthetic goal and practice. Realism, as we

remember, celebrates similarity between medium (here,

photography) and depicted reality, in other words, for

adherents of photorealism, the value of photography is its

indexical, causal quality. In contrast, writers who used

semiotics noticed the difference between picture and the

actual reality, showing how difference operates in all the

codes. As a semiologist, Barthes declared the Death of the

Author, arguing that meaning emerged through symbolic

convention and therefore the image-maker was an agent for the

22

recirculation of conventional imagery. In words of Victor

Burgin, meaning is not a matter of “genious”, “lucky snapping”

or simply something purely individual, but rather “our common

knowledge of the typical representation of prevailing social

facts and values”34. Both theories - realism and semiotics -

are useful to photographic theory, because realism privileges

similitude between codes of perception and vision, and

semiotics shows how difference operates in all codes.35

Expanded use of linguistic semiotics applied to cultural

texts gave a base to new intellectual paradigm –

structuralism, which focused on structures and rules that

organize any social practice. Later structuralism was revised

(Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel

Foucault) using methods of psychoanalysis and deconstruction;

by doing so these later writers developed post-structuralism.

These ideas challenged what were then mainstream orthodoxies

of fine art, moving value of the image from craft-value to

meaning-value, giving rise to conceptual art, and exactly in

that period (end of 1980s), photography finally started to be

absorbed into art institutions.36

34 Victor Burgin, Thinking photography (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982): 41,quoted in David Bate, Photography, the Key Concepts ( Oxford: Berg, 2009), 36.35 Olga Tjukova, How semiology has contributed to the development of photographic theory?, Edinburgh Napier University, 2012.36 Bate, Photograph, the Key Concepts, 29.

23

With help of post-structuralists, photography started to

be seen as a language of visual signs, and Barthes and his

followers aimed to identify fundamental rules (langue) that

enabled a practice (parole). As Freud’s manifested content hides

the latent content of the dream or slip of tongue, ‘the given

meaning’ of a photograph obscures the ‘constructed meaning’,

which should be interpreted and extracted. Signs have their

meaning only in the framework of particular sign system,

because the relation between sign and object is arbitrary and

unmotivated, and its interpretation depends on the viewer and

his understanding of a sign system. Sign as a unity consists

of two components – signifier (material aspect of the sign –

word, image, also known as denotation) and signified (mental

image referred to the idea/concept, connotation). Roland

Barthes noticed, that asides from the first, informational

order of meaning (the purely denotative level of the shot) and

the symbolic (intentional and “obvious”), exists the third

meaning, which is “obtuse”37, where viewer is carried away in

ethereal, personal association links. Therefore,

interpretation of a photograph, as interpretation of a dream,

is never exhausted, never quite finished. This is because the

37 Roland Barthes and Stephen Heath, "The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Some Eisenstein Stills," in Image, music, text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 44-68. Later this idea was developed by Barthes intothe notion of punctum.

24

arena of meaning of cultural text is determined by the concept

of intertextuality (relation to other texts), as well as due to

different contexts and cultural, emotional, ideological and

personal background of the viewer. Both psychoanalytics and

visual semioticians perform as detectives who solve the riddle

by uncovering latent content by hidden signs-clues.

When the imagery is incoherent and clues are not leading

to any specific meaning, it may create a humorous, absurd or

poetic effect (Fig.11, Fig.12). This image cannot be

explained(Fig.12) is a popular internet “meme”38, consisting of

images where latent content is impossible to palp, so the

meaning becomes image’s meaningless, like in theatre of the

absurd. This rearrangement of the expected order of syntax and

normal logic, mixing signifiers up to make language seem

strange or even create nonsense meanings, disrupts the sense

of reality we expect and exposes its constructed nature. 39

Language secures reality, or in other words, compensates

for the instability of reality in spite of its own

instability, being an ultimate fetish (in the words of Julia

38 Meme - an image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations, OED39 Bate, The Key Concepts. Photography, 32.

25

Kristeva40). If fetishism is understood as the displacement of

desire and fantasy onto alternative objects or body parts (eg.

a foot fetish or latex fetish)41, in order to obviate a

subject's confrontation with the castration complex, then

fetish here works as a life preserver, temporary and slippery,

but nonetheless indispensable, because language is based on

fetishist denial (‘I know that, but just the same,’42 ‘the

sign is not the thing, but just the same,’ etc.). Language

(but it is particularly clear with any other sign systems) is

not an objective reflection of reality, it is the way through

which we come to represent and see it ‘as reality’.

Language is needed to transmit information; in order to

do so data needs to be encoded, transmitted, decoded and

interpreted. I thought of this when I read Scott Walden’s

application of Fred I.Dretske’s ideas about distortion of

information channels43. Walden writes that “the quality of

40 Julia Kristeva, as found in Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Kristeva: OnPsychosexual Development." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. Purdue U, accessed on December 16, 2013, http://www.purdue.edu/guidetotheory/psychoanalysis/kristevadevelop.html.41 Sigmunt Freud, “Fetishism”. In The complete pscychological works of Sigmunt Freud, Vol.XXI, trans. J.Strachey (London: Hogarth and the Institute ofPsychoanalysis, 1927): 147-157.42 Octave Mannoni, “I Know Well, but All the Same...,” trans. G.M.Gosharian (1969), accessed December 14, 2013, http://ideiaeideologia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/Mannoni-I-know-very-well.pdf

43 Walden, Objectivity in Photography, 263.

26

[such] information channels is an inverse function of the

amount of noise or equivocation they exhibit”, defining noise

as “information at the receiver that is absent at the source,

and equivocation being information at the receiver that is

absent at the receiver”. And this noise could be anything –

mental state of both sides (artist and viewer), media, paper

quality, context, and so on. Surrealists in the 1930s and 40s

enriched the language of photography, stretching its

capability of visualising the unconscious, testing the

boundaries of medium, bringing all sorts of ‘noise’ which

would carry the image towards the occult, to the realm of

imaginary.

2.3 Surrealism

Surrealism is the art of generalizing the grotesque and then discovering nuances (and charms) in that. No activity is better equipped to exercise the Surrealist way of looking than photography, and eventually we look at all photographs surrealistically. Susan Sontag. 44

Surrealist artists (such as Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Hans

Bellmer, Raoul Ubac, Maurice Tabard) tried to visualise the

workings of the subconscious. Surrealist photography is

characterized by fantastic imagery and incongruous

juxtaposition of subject matter, although we have to bear in

mind that that the surrealist photograph is not necessarily a

‘trick’, a manipulated image. According to Krauss, surrealist 44 Sontag, On Photography, 74.

27

photography was initially unexplored due to criticism that

photography as ‘realistic medium’ is fundamentally

incompatible with the world of dreams and unconscious45.

Surrealist photography was reaffirmed and rediscovered in 80s

with exhibition and book L’amour fou by Rosalind Krauss and Jane

Livingston.

Surrealism as artistic movement was defined from the

inside by the French writer and poet André Breton in his

Manifeste du surréalisme in 1924 as ‘psychic automatism in its

pure state’. Initially surrealism was not claimed to be an

aesthetic category, it was a focus on certain states of mind

(dreams), certain criteria (marvellous) and certain process

(automatism). Marvellous, (‘convulsive beauty’ for Breton) was

found in mundane objects and everyday life (Fig.2), and

“surrealist automatism” was inspired by mediumistic practices,

although surrealists have not linked their messages to agency

of ghosts or gods. With surrealism (and automatic writing in

particular) Breton was aspired to dissolve the dualism of

perception and representation, by trying to bypass mediation

of reason, stressing “distance and exteriority of signs”. 46

45 Krauss, L'amour fou: photography & surrealism (London: Arts Council, 1985), front flap.46 Krauss, L'amour fou: photography & surrealism, 20.

28

Surrealists deliberately used Freud’s dream-theory, and

tried to abandon rational control and extract images from the

unconscious. As Breton put it, this automatism was “dictated

by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason,

exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern”.47 This concept

relates to Freud’s free association psychoanalytic technique,

and was written rather than spoken. Although in the

photographic medium, which requires control over technical

part of the process, it is hard to imagine a photographer who

is totally absorbed by his/her unconscious– some part of

him/her should remain aware to operate the machinery. But it

is possible to get in the state of ‘flow’ (complete

absorption) – improvisation within confined settings, or to

recreate the experience of ‘dipping into unconscious’ using

various techniques. Surrealist photographers invented,

discovered, rediscovered and applied such techniques as

collage, photomontage, negative printing, outagraphy, multi-

exposure, solarisation, cliché verre and photograms. They

mixed photography with other media such as drawing and

writing, where both could be automatic or/and indecipherable.

47 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. (Ann Arbor : University of Michigan, 1969), originally published as as Manifestes du Surrealisme (Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1924), 26.

29

Fragmentation, combination of several objects into one and

strange juxtapositions are also prominent in surrealist works,

creating dichotomies such as of inside/outside,

strange/familiar, constructed/organic, erotic/grotesque, etc.

(Fig.3, Fig.22, Fig.23, Fig.25, Fig.27). Surrealist work show

a great variety, making it hard to grasp the coherence,

although it is possible to distinguish two opposing strands –

linear/representational and painterly/abstract (recall

abstract liquefaction of Miro’s art vs dry surrealism of

Magritte).

Surrealists were acutely interested in the relationship

between photography and imagination, transformation of the

real into symbolic. Krauss wrote in 1985: “if we look at

certain of these photographs, we see with a shock of

recognition the simultaneous effect of displacement and

condensation, the very operations of symbol formation, hard at

work on the flesh of the real”48. Krauss especially emphasised

how spacings and doublings as surrealist manipulations were

intended to “register the spacings and doublings of that very

reality of which this photograph is merely the faithful trace”.

And spacing here means tools to “convulse reality from within”

using already mentioned array of techniques, break in the

48 Krauss, L'amour fou: photography & surrealism, 19.

30

simultaneous experience of the real, although resulting image

was preferred to look seamless – surrealists privileged

printing and double exposure over scissors and paste.

“Reality, which is present, becomes a sign for what is absent,

so that the world itself, rendered beautiful, is understood as

‘forest of signs’”49. Here lies the core of surrealist

aesthetics, what Breton called “convulsive beauty” –

experience of reality transformed into presentation. 50

Surrealists explored extensively the photographic

strategy of doubling in their works (Fig. 13, Fig.14), and

Krauss noticed that this effect creates the linguistic hold on

the real. She explained it’s working through semiotics, saying

that “the double destroys the pure singularity of the first”,

transmuting presence into succession. Repetition is also a

signifier of signification, because it is indication of

forethought. She also emphasised, that surrealist’s

preoccupation with doubling is not only a thematic concern,

but a structural one. “A critical eye thus sharpened can find

mechanisms of doubling, displacement, and mirroring even in

the most ostensibly solid works of realism.”51

49 Ibid.,31.50 Ibid., 31. 51 Robertson, Introduction to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, p xxxv

31

Sontag criticised surrealists, that they “misunderstood

what was most brutally moving, irrational, unassimilable,

mysterious - time itself”52. But I do not see this argument as

undermining my thesis. The links that photography has to time

and memory, bearing traces of how something looked some time

ago, essentially being a slice of time and space, is another

way in which photography can transmit the oneiric effect,

trespass the real.

2.4 The occult

Dreams, being a representation of the unconscious, have

much relevance to the Occult, as ritual symbolism is very much

like dream symbolism with some elaborations. Consequently,

Alfred Gell’s definition of the Occult is relevant here,

because Gell interprets rituals in primitive cultures with the

help of semiotics53.

Occult order for Gell is “the object of those techniques

and doctrines, interpretative schemes and ritual procedures,

which we commonly group together under the rubric of Magico-

Religious behaviour”, devoid of material efficacy, but which

52 Sontag, On Photography, 54.53 Alfred Gell. “Understanding the Occult.” Radical Philosophy, 9 (Winter1974): 17–26. Accessed October 7, 2013. http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/understanding-the-occult.

32

can have beneficial psychological, therapeutic and social

consequences. Through ritual primitive cultures seek access to

this hidden order of reality. Alfred Gell rejected the idea

that religion and magic are interpretative theories about the

order of Nature, because “primitive theory building and

western science relate to different conceptual universes”- in

short, religion and science have no object in common. He also

noticed that such practices cannot be discussed only in terms

of expressiveness, akin to art. Instead, he emphasised an

unexplainable irreducible quality of those behaviours and

proposed alternative world-construct which corresponds to

primitive cosmological and magical systems. Gell recalls

Fortes distinction of two realms – occult and realm of the

‘patent’, where occult forces are manifested in chance-

dominant occurrences, things patent can be known by sensory

experience, and ritual is a technique for ‘prehending the

occult’. Gell goes further, explaining that personalised

cultural symbols of occult power, such as Gods and Spirits,

are only images of the occult, while the essence of it cannot

be grasped. Gell’s definition of the Occult as a domain “where

events are when they are not happening” slightly resembles

Karen Armstrong’s definition of Myth – “something that had in

some sense happened once but that also happens all the time

33

(giving a hint of templates of behaviour and situations that

most people face in their lives). Gell proposes a thesis, that

occult arises as a particular way of conceptualising the

relation between consciousness and larger totality of

potential events. “Any act of perception can be seen as

involving a ‘patent’ aspect – the aspect of the object given

to me in here-and-now perception, and a ’hidden’ aspect, which

is given me via appresentative coupling, which I fill in for

myself in the course of articulating the object in the rest of

my experience”. Gell brings up Fortes’s idea that overall

ritual symbolism is very much like dream symbolism –latent

symbolic content of ritual (concerning unconscious forces) has

to be disguised in oblique symbolic language before it can

become public, so it reflects the operation of censorship. But

Gell stands against this, as the Occult “is by nature

incapable of direct representation, since it does not

correspond to anything in the world”, and proposes another

world-construction within which normal casual-explicable

events (death, marriage, seasonal cycle) are grasped as

synchronistic phenomena, i.e., as complexes of meaning.

Fundamental aspect of occult is internal to human

psyche, dark and autonomous region of the spirit, that is –

the unconscious, that does not correspond to the world of

34

objects. What is interesting for my purpose is that Gell

stresses the power of metaphor and metonymy. These “salient

feature of magical rituals and spells” (stone can represent

the sun, a fragment of the wood – tree of the world), work as

mediators between experience and contingencies which transcend

experience. For Gell, such ‘poetic’ devices are not merely

expressionistic tools, “they are part of the mechanism of the

magical act itself, because they subsume the objective of the

ritual performance into a larger pattern within which the

desirable outcome is inevitable.”

Another important term from Gell, is the concept of

synchronicity, as inner articulation of the magical universe,

adopted from Jung with certain modifications. Jung saw

synchronicity as an ‘acausal connecting principle’ which

manifested itself as a ‘psychic relativity of space and time’

and which are seen from the perspective of a particular ego as

uniquely meaningful. Jung proposes to explain this phenomenon

as “being triggered off by the emergence (under suitable

psychic conditions) of archetypal contents into the conscious

mind”. Synchronicity is understood as a relation between

things or events “which is established by their common

participation in a subjectively grasped scheme of meanings54. 54 Another example may be found in painting by Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930) – in graphical unity between window frame and pitchfork.

35

By the way, some images correspondent to this notion of

synchronicity - when there is a graphic resemblance or unity

between different objects, and this may create poetic or

humorous effect (Fig.15, Fig.16). In conclusion, Gell adds

that magic thought only reflects the world, and there is

nothing outside the boundaries of the world - “transcendence

is zero transcendence, a field of empty possibility

corresponding to nothing”.

So, in a sense, artists perform like shamans – giving

release to personal and social unease, manifesting the

unknown, or representing the processes which happen in society

but are yet to be apprehended. They create imagery and

symbols which need to be interpreted through spectator’s (or

listener’s) experience and understanding. Shaman-like

appearance is sometimes used by music performers – for example

quite explicitly in the imagery of the band Fever Ray (Fig. 17)

and it also might be observed in various scenic costumes (Fig.

18). Ritual practices look mystic even when captured with the

most documental approach (Fig. 19) due to its connection with

the Occult triggered by painted faces, handmade masks of

animals or Gods, costumes and other props.

36

Chapter 3 – Conventions of Dream-like in Photography

Milne writes that in sleep, “as one emerges from the

hiatus, one must fabricate some account of where the self has

been (…). The returning ego must write itself back into

being, more precisely, it writes itself in retroactively”,

manufacturing a dream-experience, which “sutures together the

edges of the break in consciousness. The dream can be thought

of as a repair, or darn to the ego; producing ‘wrinkles’ in

reality around the repair”. Dream-experience thus occurs

“through the fantasy conventions used to enact the suture:

transformations of scale, of colour, impossibly hybrid things,

reversals and displacement”55. This idea of patching the

fragmented narrative is mentioned by Freud describing the work

of delusion as attempt of self-cure from psychosis. Delusion

is “found applied like a patch over the place where originally

a rent had appeared in the ego’s relation to the external

world”56. For Freud, as Leader summed up, “much of psychosis

is about restitution, the effort to recreate or re-establish

contact with it” 57, noticing the oddness of delusional 55 Louise Milne, “On the side of the angels”, in Susan Hiller: recall: selected works, 1969-2004 (Gateshead: Baltic & Porto: Museu de Arte ... & Basel: Kunsthalle, 2004), 139-155.56 Sigmund Freud , ed.,James Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey, andAlan Tyson. "Neurosis and Psychosis," in The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (1923-1925) (London: Vintage :, 2001) 149-157.57 Leader. What is madness?, 70.

37

thought. Here lie reasons for similarity between

representations of madness and dreams as bypass of censorship

or reason.

Technical, photographic and art historical (aesthetic

conventions) codes are combined in the image to produce a

rhetoric argument. Throughout this chapter I will examine how

closed eyes of the sitter, defragmentation, fuzziness (and

related cloud convention), colour usage, and mythic/historic

stylisation work. Moreover, I will touch a set of conventions

specific to nightmarish imagery. In addition to that, we can

identify some codes of sequencing the photo story; and ways of

playing them off – this is visible in works of Duane Michals

(Fig. 21).

Oneiric effects in photography is a large and complex subject,

although some effects and tools are reoccurring and then can

be noticed and grouped. But we have to bear in mind, that by

themselves, “codes are meaningless, like phonemes in

language”58 – instead, these should be interpreted in a set.

Taking Freud’s concept of dreams as day residue’s distortions

together with experimentations in surrealist photography we

can see how, in semiotic terms, oneiric figuration is achieved

by inverted or distorted realistic codes, which are evoked and

58 Bate, Photograph, the Key Concepts, 36.

38

then broken. Let’s look at these and some other conventions of

dream-like imagery in more detail.

3.1 Defragmentation

Linda Nochlin, the American art historian, in her Body in

Pieces (1994)59 discusses contemporary artists (Cindy Sherman,

Fig.42) and modernists, such as Edouard Manet (Fig.6), pulling

together photography and painting to support her argument.

This extended essay is important in the context of this paper

for several reasons. The idea of dismemberment then assembling

the parts in new ways relates to the function of dream-work

and also evokes a famous remark of Karl Marx’s in his

Communist Manifesto:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned and men at last are forced to face … the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men. Karl Marx60

Nochlin considers bodily destruction, dismemberment and

fragmentation over the past 300 years in visual arts as an

important device to express the feel of modern living. She

starts with a wash drawing by Henri Fuselli61, depicting the

59 Linda Nochlin, The body in pieces: the fragment as a metaphor of modernity (Reprint, New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1994).60 Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, as quoted in Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernit (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1982, and London, Verso, 1983),21.61 Henri Fuseli, The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins, 1778-79.

39

artist sitting next to a giant ancient statue’s body parts,

supposedly mourning over lost totality and vanished wholeness.

She then argues that Modernity itself is constructed out of

this fragmented past, and so holding a special place for

iconography of destruction. For example, during the course of

French Revolution, artists used fragmented imagery, such as

beheading of the king, as a strategy to pulverize repressive

traditions of the past.

The human body is an object of desire and so the site of

suffering, pain and death. Images of bodily fragments can work

in two ways. Predominantly female (seemingly) fragmented parts

may function as a sign of the marvellous in Surrealist

production, as in this work by Brassaï (Fig. 22). On the other

hand, “reassembled in the form of horrific photographs of

mutilated dolls, female body parts (for example in series by

Hans Bellmer, Fig.23) may serve as the site of transgressive

questioning of both sexuality and the body as a unified

entity.”62 Recent work by Elizaveta Porodina (Fig.24), shows

that such imagery is now part of visual culture and used

ubiquitously.

62 Linda Nochlin, The body in pieces: the fragment as a metaphor of modernity (Reprint, New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1994).

40

What about the mask, also a representation of a fragment

of a human body? First of all, this self-portrait by Cahun

(Fig.25) may be seen as embodiment of Freudian concepts, where

mask manifest content is a distorted substitute of latent

content. Here the face is hidden and identity is not revealed

–instead we are facing a plane surface of a mask, literally a

dead pan. Moreover, the sitter’s pose is almost hidden under a

black veil, suppressing another extra-linguistic channel -

body language. This mask has human features, but something is

not right – too flawless surface, lack of emotion in the eyes,

too glossy and bulging lips create disturbance. The unsettling

feeling has been explained in terms of popular psychology

through the notion of uncanny valley – a term proposed by

roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970. This hypothesis in the field

of human aesthetics holds that when robot (or any other

creature) looks and acts nearly, but not exactly like a human

(or how it is supposed to behave) it causes a response of

revulsion.63 This is one reason why lifelike cartoons are very

hard to produce to avoid such aversion. Other examples can be

found in the medical fields and plastic surgery, for example,

such as burn reconstruction and neurological conditions. Karl

MacDorman proposed to explain this effect as a matter of a

63 Masahiro Mori, "The Uncanny Valley," in Robotics & Automation Magazine (IEEE 19, no. 2, 2012), 98-100, accessed December 9, 2013 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6213238.

41

mismatch. “If you have an extremely realistic skin texture,

but at the same time cartoonish eyes, or realistic eyes and an

unrealistic skin texture, that's very uncanny."64

There is something quite alien about the manipulated faces, as if they belong to some futuristic next generation. Alma Haser.65

Recalling Nochlin’s arguments about defragmentation

another example shows how it can be manifested in photography.

Alma Haser made a series of portraits (Fig.9), where sitters

are presented with, what at first looks like, mutilated face.

In fact, that disturbing part is a print of sitter’s portrait,

folded in a manner of modular origami, not an effect done in

post-production as it may seem. This folded print of the face

constructs uncanny, disturbing effect, because photograph of a

photograph looks like intrinsic element of depictured scene –

viewer can’t instantly recognize artificial nature of origami,

and may presume that it is made out of flesh. Symmetry of this

folding reminds me of ideas about fabric of the universe –

invisible energy flows which permeate everything, and that

some claim to see under the influence of psychedelic drugs

(references to such imagery are visible in psytrance culture

64 Erik Sofge, "The Truth About Robots and the Uncanny Valley: Analysis," in Popular Mechanics, accessed December 8, 2013, http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/robots/4343054.65 Alma Haser. Artist statement, Cosmic Surgery, accessed November 11, 2013, http://www.haser.org/Cosmic-Surgery.

42

and, for example, in Alex Grey’s works, Fig.26)66. And when I

look at these portraits I also recall mandalas - a spiritual

and ritual symbol in Hinduism and Buddhism, representing the

Universe. But even without going too deep into these dubious

speculations, symmetry principles are visible in many nature

forms – such as recursive nature of Romanesco broccoli,

symmetry of snowflakes, etc. Thus the link with occult, as if

there is an organizing universal principle that makes plants,

trees and some primitive animals follow this mould. This idea

that God created the universe according to a geometric plan

has ancient origins and is expressed in the concept of sacred

geometry. Now the explanation can be found in the Theory of

Chaos.

3.2 Ethereality and mythic characters

Modernity, metaphorised by the fragment, also seeks for

totalization. Linda Nochlin supports this argument with words

of Marshall Berman, who emphasized the importance of

Baudelaire’s use of concept of fluidity. Fluidity, as

“floating existences” and gaseousness, which “envelops and

soaks us like an atmosphere” stands as symbols for moving,

66 Dave Hickey gives deep understanding of psychodelia in his essay Freaks in Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Art Issues Press, 1997)

43

changing world67 and compensates that loss of solidity. This

can be seen in impressionist paintings, some surrealist and

pictorialist photography. In fact, impressionism was the first

artistic movement connected with the modern experience in

terms of subject matter and manner of representation.

Although perspectival codes are evoked in camera

automatically, one can alter the resulting image, for example,

using distorted sheet of glass in front of the camera lens, or

using fish-eye or tilt-and-shift lenses. In his famous series

Distortions (Fig. 27), Kertezs used optical experiments with

reflections and deforming mirrors to achieve this effect of

liquidity. Bodies look like they exist obeying the rules of

non-Euclidean geometry. This reminds of sprawling imagery of

Salvador Dali (famous melting clocks, icon symbol of

surrealist painting) and Yves Tanguy (Fig. 28).

Cameron and Hudson White pictures (Fig.29 and Fig.30)

are marked with fuzziness and soft painterly edges. This makes

facial features slightly vague, so the spectator might project

impressions that he wants to see onto the sitters. This

technique, called fuzzography by Victorian critics is similar

to sfumato –painting technique which leaves the key features 67 Marshall Berman, Modernism in the Streets, Dissent 55, Nr 4 (Fall2008): 144, as cited in Linda Nochlin, The body in pieces: the fragment as a metaphor of modernity (Reprint, New York, N.Y.: Thames and Hudson, 1994).

44

of the face indistinct (for example, used by Da Vinci in Mona

Lisa and Rembrant’s self-portraits)68. In painting this device

was notably used by impressionists, such as Monet and Manet

(Fig.6).

Julia Cameron often pictured her sitters in

medievalising, romantic manner, for example, showing them as

Shakespearian characters (Ophelia, 1867)69. For inspiration she

also used iconography of Christian art (Mary Hillier as Madonna with

Two Children, 1964; Romeo and Juliet, 1867) and poetry (Mountain

Nymph Sweet Liberty, 1866). This device is linked to broader idea

of history being a sort of collective memory, even a

collective hallucination, which symbols are reoccurring

constantly, perpetuating the imagery. Nakedness of the

sitter/s (Fig.22, Fig.27, Fig.33, Fig.45) can carry the image

towards the symbolic, abstracting from social and historic

context, making the image more universal, same may be applied

to ahistoric fabrics wrapped around the sitter instead of the

outfit, which don’t point to any specific era.

68 Bate, Photograph, the Key Concepts, 84.69 By the way, contemporary photographers often turn to the image of Ophelia (Fig.31). Another example featuring mythic characters can be found in White’s work The Pipes of Pan (Fig.30), in which he makes references to Ancient Greek (and Roman) myth of god of the wild called Pan.

45

Freud noted great influence that folk-tales have on

mental life70. In the visions of contemporary dreamers,

Hollywood stars or popular singers, for example, can act like

characters, as they are now a part of collective memory. These

characters got into psychic vocabulary through popular

culture, which is a modern mythology, part of shared culture.

Legendary figures and stories pass through generations in

their near-original form and also by multiplying through other

images and references. Laura Mulvey named it as a “collective

pool of imagery, like a bank or a resource that provides a

release for the individual psyche, unable to express itself

‘in so many words’.”71

3.3 On Colour

One way to represent a dream in photography derives from

the realist tradition of colour usage, and I will discuss how

it works in black and white and colour photography; this

device has its roots in much older imagery.

To represent a dream-state artists often use exaggerated

colours, more vivid and saturated then original ones,

70 Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dream, 1900 (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999), and Sigmunt Freud, The Occurrence in Dreams of Material from Fairy Tales (London: Hogarth Press, 1913).

71 Laura Mulvey, "Pandora: Topographies of the Mask & Curiosity," in Sexuality &space (New York, N.Y.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 67.

46

inverted, acid, aurora borealis effects (Fig.32, Fig.33), and

various filters, “noises” (these can be applied at any stage

of production - during the shooting, post-production, or in

printing).

Nowadays with the help of filters for Instagram or, for

example, quite fresh application called Glitche72 users can add

random glitch effects (or digital distortions) to their images

or video clips. These applications add ‘artistic’ noise to the

image or video and are extremely popular - one of the most

famous users of Glitche is fashion photographer Nick Knight

(Fig.32). Instagram has an arsenal of filters which simulate

physical damage of film or alternative processes such as

cross-process). Output images after Glitche look like they have

been distorted by digital errors and bugs; such method of

manipulating the image is called Glitch art, and bears

resemblance with surrealist’s experimentations (éclaboussure 73

, brûlage74, soufflage75, multiple-exposure techniques, etc)

and its attempts to remove author’s direct agency in resulting

image, playing with a chance, fortune. Resulting image becomes

72 Glitche, Distort your photos into works of digital art, accessed December, 9, 2013, http://glitche.com/.73 Technique used in oil paints or watercolours – work is laid down and water or turpentine is splattered, then soaked up to reveal random splatters or dots where the media was removed.74 Image is modified by melting the negative emulsion before printing (Krauss, p.24, 1985)75 Liquid paint is blown to inspire or reveal an image.

47

mysterious possibly because these distortions look like

something outside human perception registered by electronic

devices. Combined with hidden, closed or rolled eyes of the

sitter (Fig.33-35) this becomes a way to externalize, visually

represent sitter’s state of mind.

In both black and white and colour photographs which

could be called “dream-like” we notice images with low-key

lighting, or images which contain a lot of dark areas – it is

particularly visible in Eyemazing book76 - colours of majority

of the images would be on the dark side of tone histogram. On

one hand, it is linked to curator group’s conceptual choice,

on the other, dark parts can signify the unknown and point to

unexamined parts of the psyche. Dark (unlighted) areas bear

the possibility of containing something hidden. Historically

images of Hell also bear this shift, as hell is described in

Scripture77 as outer darkness (Fig.36).

I found a peculiar statement on Roger Ballen’s (Fig.1)

online portfolio about his work in general: “Black and White is a

very minimalist art form and unlike colour photographs does not pretend to mimic

the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive. Black and

White is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer

76 Susan Eyemazing. Eyemazing. The new collectible art photography. Farnborough: Thames & Hudson Ltd., 201377 New Testament, Gospel of Matthew (8:11-12, 22:13-14, and 25:30), c.70-110

48

to as reality”.78 So, colour alteration is one possible consequence

of transformation of the real into symbolic order.

Using only black and white, or other monochrome colours

(Fig.4) it is easier to merge something into something else.

It is linked with the fact that joins are hard to do in

colour, and in painting these are often covered in sleeves,

collars, etc (and it is an obvious way to avoid detalisation

of dubious parts). This quality of black and white colour

usage was noted long before the invention of black and white

photography - Panofsky in his book The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer

comments on distancing (dream-like) aspects of black and white

painting using illustrations for Book of Revelations (Fig. 37).

3.4 Cloud convention and closed eyes

Concerning Dürer’s image I would like to comment also on

the altar in the circle in top left corner of the picture,

surrounded by praying angels, signifying the presence of the

God79. By juxtaposing this Renaissance woodcut and “thought

bubbles” used in comic strips (Fig.38 and Fig.39) it is

possible to notice a convention of a cloud of thought – a way

78 "Roger Ballen Photography." Introduction. http://www.rogerballen.com/ (accessed December 8, 2013).79 Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, "Saint John Devouring the Book from The Apocalypse, Albrecht Dürer, c. 1497-98," accessed December 10, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cA0IwTL5zY.

49

to graphically represent what the protagonist is thinking

about, or, as in Dürer’s image, something concealed, not

visible, but existing, felt. This idea was articulated in

detail by Robert T. Eberwein concerning cinema in his book

Film & the dream screen: a sleep and a forgetting80. In photographic image

blurry, cloud-like edges can signify that we are entering the

territory of the dream, or internal psychic life. It is even

possible to think about Fox Talbot’s photograms of plants

(Fig.40) as representations of mental images, as objects

depicted are derived from social or political aspects and

present isolated units, as like appeared, or projected onto

the dream screen. Also, if the object is near or above the

head of the sitter, it may signify that it is what the sitter

is thinking about, these are contents of his thoughts.

(Fig.20, Fig.41)

Focus on a particular object indicates its importance

and there is a convention to have eyes in classic portraiture

sharp. Eyes of the sitter indicate what he/she is looking at;

consequently closed eyes may connote that he/she is dead,

sleeping or immersed in hallucinatory visions (“looking

inside”). Closed eyes may suggest the confines of a dream or

sitter’s thoughts, cut away from reality (Fig. 20, Fig.33-35).

80 Robert T Eberwein. Film & the dream screen: a sleep and a forgetting. Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984.

50

Both of these conventions are applied together, for

example, in photograph by Vilnis (Fig.20), where thrown flour

resembles space, stars, galactic. According to artist

statement81, it signifies thoughts, working of the mind. Fog

is another symbol of liminality, and is linked to idea of

clouded thinking. Doubling, fuzzy, blurry, smudged eyes

usually point to mental state of the viewer or sitter, same

applies to overall ‘out-of-focus’ image – such effect

signifies the state of losing consciousness, being drugged or

dreaming (Fig. 13). For more on fuzziness please refer to

3.3 Fuziness and mythic characters.

3.5 On nightmares

Nightmare imagery is a significant part of the dream-

like imagery and is marked by specific set of conventions.

Barry Keith Grant noticed that horror movies address

“fears that are both universally taboo and that also respond

to historically and culturally specific anxieties”82, and same

might be applied to photographic images. In contrast, as

observed by Calvin Hall, political questions almost never

81 "Purgatory," Nils Vilnis Photographer, accessed December 17, 2013, http://www.vinils.lv/. 82 Barry Keith Grant, "Screams on Screens: Paradigms of Horror," in Thinking after Dark: Welcome to the World of Horror Video Games 4, no. 6 (2010), 4.Accessed October, 13. http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/85.

51

enter actual dreams. 83 This is clearly linked to Freud’s

definition of a dream being a return of the repressed

infantile desire in disguised and distorted form, so no

surprise that such imagery often deals with universal fears of

body and anxieties around sex and sexual performance.

Nightmarish,” dark surreal “photographs often deal with bodily

horrors – mutilation and decay, which stems out of fear of

death and losing control over one’s body. This is relevant,

for example, to works of Joel-Peter Witkin (Fig.8) and Alma

Haser’s series (Fig.9).

Barbara Creed84 describes twelve categories (and the list

may be expanded), with at least eighteen subdivisions of the

monstrous body of horror, or ways body can project different

fears. In her writing Creed uses Julia Kristeva’s concept of

abjection as “that which does not respect borders, positions,

rules, that which disturbs identity, system, order”85, and

Creed asserts that the concept of a border is central to the

construction of the body-monstrous of horror. Let us see how

83 Calvin Hal, “A Cognitive Theory of Dreams” in The Journal of General Psychology 49 (1953): 273-82, as quoted in Thorsten Bornstein, "Ingmar Bergman and Dream after Freud," in Films and dreams: Tarkovsky, Bergman, Sokurov, Kubrick, and Wong Kar-wai (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007),37-53.

84 Barbara Creed, "Horror and the Carnivalesque," in Fields of vision: essays in film studies, visual anthropology, and photography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 127-159.85 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)

52

some of these categories of body-monstrous, are evoked in

photography and create horrifying effects.

This photograph by Cindy Sherman (Fig.42) exploits a

constellation of fears – her artificial doll consists of

fragments which represent dismembered, sexually deviant,

gender confused impregnated (and thus maternal) body with the

face of an old man, laid on the sea of hair. Germaine

Advertising Agency (Fig.43) combined head of a fish with male

body, creating a terrifying effect which evokes a will to stop

the climate change immediately – according to Mulvey’s

classification this is “the metamorphosing, transforming

body”. Such mutants assembled from fragments can be viewed as

examples of displacement and condensation86. Ralph Eugene

Meatyard (Fig.44) plays on composition of infant body with a

mask and doubled artificial body (dolls). Crossfield (Fig.45)

presents a series called “Foreign Body” where two naked man

are combined into almost one unit which looks like Siamese

twins.

Louise Milne calls nightmare a nightmare-text: “what is

actively remembered by the dreamer and so brought into the

86 For more information on iconography of defragmentation see above, 3.1 Defragmentation.

53

zone of conscious culture” 87. This analysis traces changes of

conventions used to represent the experience throughout the

centuries. We can apply same definition to dreams in general

and thus trace changes in semiotics of particular dream-

symbols. Milne then argues that changes of motifs in

nightmares depend not only on changing material culture, but

also on “changing habits of conceptualization, such as

perspectival space and narrative convention”. We can divide

archaic and modern visualisations of dreams. Ancient

representation of dreamers as possessed by nightmare-entity,

like spirit or incubus, is now replaced by images of “content”

of a dream. For example, ancient would report about his/her

dream as “I had an encounter with the monster who sends down

bad dreams”, while modern tendency is to perceive the dream as

a kind of one-act scenario, or a spontaneous movie usually

with a dreamer as protagonist – “I dreamt I was in the

classroom, and a monster attacked me”. An interesting fact in

support of this argument – once my friend told me that she had

a dream which ended with closing titles of actors.

Milne looks at dreams and visions of three groups of

people – Hans Prinzhorn’s collection of drawings of asylum

inmates in early 20s Germany, nightmares of upper middle-class

87 Louise Milne, “Spirits and Other Worlds in Nightmare Imagery” (Cosmos 24, 2011), 177-210.

54

Jews during the years of Third Reich and visions of patients

who spent decades in “frozen” state in virulent forms of

Parkinson’s disease before awakening. These groups are chosen

to demonstrate variety of imagery from different states of

mind – hallucinations (visions of unsound mind), dreams (under

oppression of Nazi) and in-between state that resembles coma.

By discussing these examples, she proves that visual

dream imagery consists of references to folk-culture and

religion as well as reflects social and historical changes,

such as industrialisation (for example, escalating number of

hallucinations and visions of though-controlling machines).

Archaic elements such as teeth and claws (related to natural

fear of pain and body mutilation) are now sometimes replaced

by needles and syringes. Fear of witchcraft (lost control over

oneself) is replaced by fear of “thought-controlling

machines”. Other reoccurring images of first machine-age are

elements of self-splitting and patterns, regimentations and

repetitions and deconstruction of those. “The spatial

arrangements and imagery … invoke the mechanical rhythms of

mass-production: spinning, robotic repetition; a hall of

mirrors” – ego sees itself suspended in never-ending,

55

recurrent pattern.88 This remind me about Cosmic Surgery series

(Fig.9).

Imagery of self-spitting, or dédoublement, needs some

more attention here. This term “defines a moment when the self

appears to shadow itself – confronting itself with an avatar

of desire, an uncanny double, a projection filled with its own

emotion”. In psychiatry, this symptom is called “ego-alien”,

but this process is natural for every dreamer. Ego-structure

is dismantled in the course of dreaming – one part projects

mise-en-scène, another “experiences” it.

Milne concludes that modern nightmares have two

distinctive lineages – attack by monsters and entrapment in a

monstrous mise-en-scène. Codes and conventions lead to

cathexis - the confrontation with the malleable, occult self,

and this reassemble can be embraced with fear or pleasure,

depending on dreamer’s culture. This idea of splitting of ego

can be evoked in photography in doubling (See Fig.8, Fig.13,

Fig.14, Fig.45, Fig.48)89.

3.6 Place in contemporary art world

Nowadays “dry” surrealism is very popular in fashion

(Fig.46), advertisement (Fig.47) and art photography. Many

88 Milne, “Spirits and Other Worlds,” 192.89 How surrealists elaborated dédoublement see 2.3 Surrealism.

56

devices I’ve discussed (condensation and displacement) are

used in variety of forms and contexts – music CD covers, book

covers, promotional and advertising materials, art

photography, etc. We can find an array of young contemporary

photographers who are enchanted by possibilities of digital

manipulation and explore the world of dreams and imagination

(Mikael Aldo, Christian Hopkins, Norvz Austria, Elena

"KaSSandrA" Vizerskaya, Kyle Thompson and many others). Some

(Olivia Bee, Bridget Collins, Alena Zhandarova, Viviane Sassen

– Fig.48) achieve oneiric effects in camera by directly

manipulating and directing the environment and models, others

combine both approaches (Fig.49).

“Painterly” surrealism is very much celebrated, for

example, in Eyemazing90, 2013. This book brings together best

works published in Eyemazing magazine over the last decade

into two streams of imagery: ‘Dreams and Memories of a Past

Life’ and ‘Our Body, Our Cage. Our Body, Our Home’ and is

presented as a selection of art photography (mainly shoot on

film and using alternative film processes), which push

boundaries and defy conventions of the market (artists

included: Michael Ackerman, Roger Ballen, Sally Mann, Miroslav

Tichý, Joel-Peter Witkin, etc).

90 Susan Eyemazing. Eyemazing. The new collectible art photography (Farnborough: Thames & Hudson Ltd.)

57

58

Conclusion

I focused mainly on dream-states, but the same applies

to representations of madness, hallucinations, and to certain

extent to spiritual/religious visions.

Each photograph contains a manifest content which needs

to be interpreted to gain access to latent, hidden content,

just like a dream. There are similarities one can find between

dreams and images, for example two notions adopted from

Freudian Dream Interpretation – condensation and displacement.

Condensation is marked by condensed content which evokes a

number of free associations and can be linked to the notion of

polysemantics – where a symbol may stand for several

associations and ideas, and its interpretation is never quite

finished. Displacement means that a dream object’s emotional

significance is separated from its real object or content and

attached to an entirely different one which does not raise the

censor’s suspicions. In visual culture this may be manifested

in object's transformations, liquidity, distorted

perspectives, doubling, notions of liminality, fragmented,

mutilated, dismembered bodies (possibly put together in new

ways), technique of collage, double exposures, etc.

59

Through this examination, one can see that the keyword

to describe oneiric effects as a whole is distortion, which can

happen on many levels and through one or several visual codes.

Closed, blurred or rolled eyes of the sitter suggest that

he/she is immersed in his/hers thoughts or visions. The

ancient cloud convention shows visions or thoughts content.

This may be manifested in blurred edges of the frame, objects

close to or coming out of the head, unfocused, slipping to

blur, new-born or “drugged” vision which may be achieved, for

example, through image processing, tilt and shift lenses.

Historical periods may also be presented as mythic, because

history can be perceived as a collective dream/hallucination.

This might be seen in romantisation through medivialising of

the imagery, for example. Same applies when sitter’s

appearance, posture and/or background are stylized to

represent mythic characters. And vice-versa, nakedness of the

sitters, or clothes which don’t belong to any particular era

(tunics, models wrapped in monotone fabrics), presumably

brings the imagery closer to symbolic, universal. Oneiric

effects may be also achieved when realist colour conventions

are broken – exaggerated or altered colours, including black

and white photography, filters and alternative processes.

Terrifying, nightmarish imagery is linked to the return of the

60

repressed painful memories, tabooed desires which came back to

consciousness in distorted form. These are manifested in

explicit body-oriented imagery, sometimes merging eros and

thanatos.

Oneiric effects are omnipresent in contemporary visual

culture, and with this research I proposed some methods how to

understand the working of such effects.

61

Figures

Figure 1. Roger Ballen, Pielie,2012, Archival pigment print

Figure 2. Brassaï. Graffiti de la Série V, Animaux: Chimère, 1933-1956,Galerie Karsten Greve AG, St. Moritz, Cologne

Figure 3. Salvador Dali and Horst P. Horst, Costume design for “The Dream of

Figure 4. Hieronymus Bosch, The Trees Have Ears and the Field Has Eyes, ca. 1500, Kupferstichkabinett,

62

Venus”, 1939, The Israel Musem, Jerusalem

Berlin

Figure 5. Caravaggio, Medusa, 1597, Uffizi Gallery, Florence

63

Figure 6. Edouard Manet, The Road-Menders, Rue de Berne, 1878, Private Collection

Figure 7. Reza Farazmand, Too Real, 2013, www.poorlydrawnlines.com

Figure 8. Joel-Peter Witkin, Invention of Milk, 1982,Private Collection

Figure 9. Alma Haser, Cosmic Surgery. Felix, 2013, http://www.haser.org/Cosmic-Surgery

64

Figure 10. Google Play search results for keywords “dream dictionary”, November 2013

Figure 11. Anon., Untitled, c.2008

Figure 12. Alena Zhandarova, Cornflowertea and concealing chocolates, 2012, www.alenazhandarova.com

65

Figure 13. Man Ray, La Marquise Cassati, 1922, Collection Lucien Treillard, Paris

Figure 14. Maurice Tabard, Study, 1929, Collection SFMOMA,San Francisco

Figure 15. Noell S. Oszvald, Prejudice, 2013, http://www.flickr.com/people/noellosvald/

For some reason this Sister of Charity in Waterville, Maine, is drawn to a painting of seagull taking wing.

Figure 16. Anon., LIFE Laughs Last, ed. Philip B.

66

Kunhardt, 1989

Figure 17. Johan Renck, for Fever Ray, 2009, www.johanrenck.com

Figure 18. Frank Buttenbender, IAMX in Electric Ballroom, London (2013),http://www.theupcoming.co.uk/2013/04/20/concert-review-iamx-at-the-electric-ballroom/

Figure 19. Markéta Luskačová, On Death And Horses And Other People, 2006, www.marketaluskacova.com/?page=photo&id=18035

67

Figure 20. Nils Vilnis, Purgatory. Image Nr 10, 2010-2013, www.vinils.lv

68

Figure 21. Duane Michals, The Human Condition, 1969, Nohra Haime Gallery, New York

Figure 22. Brassaï, Untitled, 1933, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Manfred Heiting Collection. © The Brassaï Estate-RMN.

69

Figure 23. Hans Bellmer, Untitled, from La Poupée (The Doll) 1935. Collection SFMOMA, San Francisco.

Figure 24. Elizaveta Porodina, Untitled, 2013, www.porodina.net

70

Figure 25. Claude Cahun. Self Portrait (in robe with masks attached), 1928, Courtsey of the Jersey Heritage Collections, Jersey

Figure 26. Alex Grey, Ecstasy, 1995, alexgrey.com

Figure 27. André Kertész, Distortion #147, 1933, Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Figure 28. Yves Tanguy, My Life White and Black, 1944, Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, © 2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

71

Figure 29. Julia Margaret Cameron, Mary Ryan with Photogram Frame of Plant Forms, c.1864

Figure 30. Clarence Hudson White, The Pipes of Pan, 1907. TheRoyal Photographic Society, Bradford

Figure 31. Google image search using keywords “Ophelia photography”, December 12, 2013

72

Figure 32. Nicola Formichetti and Nick Knight, for #DIESELTRIBUTE campaign, 2013

Figure 33.Olivia Locher, In Dreams, 2013, olivialocher.com/dreams.html

Figure 34. Anon., http://glitch-evcore.tumblr.com/c.2013

Figure 35. Anon., http://glitch-evcore.tumblr.com/ c.2013

73

Figure 36.Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1503–1504,Museo Nacional Del Prado, Madrid

Figure 37. Dürer, Saint John devouring the Book, 1498,Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe

Figure 38. Roy Lichtenstein, Thinking of him, 1963, Yale University Art Gallery,New Haven, Connecticut

74

Figure 39. Porter Mason, Who am I on the phone with?, 2009, portermason.com

Figure 40. William Henry Fox Talbot, A Stem of Delicate Leaves of an Umbrellifer, c.1845, J. Paul Getty Museum, California

Figure 41. Philippe Halsman, Dali Skull, 1951, The Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP), Chicago

Figure 42. Cindy Sherman, Untitled #250, 1992, Museum of Modern Art, New York

75

Figure 43. Germaine Advertising Agency for World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), 2008

Figure 44. Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, ca. 1963, Collection of theInternational Center of Photography, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Traub, 1980

Figure 45. Antony Crossfield, Foreign Body 2, 2005, Klompching Gallery,Brooklyn

Figure 46. Tejal Patni for fashion brand Splash, 2011. http://tejalpatni.com/

76

Figure 47. Serviceplan for Faber-Castell, 2010

Figure 49. Elizaveta Porodina,Untitled, 2012 porodina.net

Figure 48. Viviane Sassen, Flamboya / Mirrorman, 2008, www.vivianesassen.com

77

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Artists websites:

Anon,. http://glitch-evcore.tumblr.com/Ballen, Roger. http://www.rogerballen.com/Crossfield, Antony. http://antonycrossfield.com/Grey, Alex. alexgrey.comHaser, Alma. http://www.haser.org/Farazmand, Reza. www.poorlydrawnlines.comLocher, Olivia. olivialocher.comLuskačová, Markéta. www.marketaluskacova.comMason, Porter. portermason.comNils Vilnis http://www.vinils.lv/Noell S., Oszvald. http://www.flickr.com/people/noellosvaldPatni, Tejal. http://tejalpatni.com/Porodina, Elizaveta. www.porodina.netRenck, Johan. www.johanrenck.comSassen, Vivian. www.vivianesassen.comWitkin, Peter Joel. www.edelmangallery.com/witkin.htmZhandarova, Alena. www.alenazhandarova.com

Other online resources:

www.artnet.com/ - Artnet Worldwide Corporationcollections.vam.ac.uk/ - Victoria&Albert Museum, Search the Collectionswww.freud.org.uk - Freud Museum Londonwww.moma.org - The Museum of Modern Artwww.radicalphilosophy.com – Radical Philosophy Journalwww.sfmoma.org - San Francisco Museum of Modern Artwww.uofmhealth.org - University of Michigan Health Systemhttp://glitche.com/ - Glitche, Distort your photos into works of digital arthttp:// instagram.com – Instagram App http://www.tineye.com/ - Reverse Image Search

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