Man Ray and Max Dupain surrealism

The Guardian

a day ago

Max Dupain made a swift transition from pictorialism to modernist values in his photography in the mid-1930s. Light, pattern and relationship became more important to his work, as did cropping, framing and technical experimentation. His use of solarisation and photomontage in Homage to Man Ray synthesises a curious but compelling image that hovers between reality and otherworldliness. Photograph: Max Dupain
Eyes are a key motif in surrealist iconography as a symbol of inner vision and Man Ray believed they 'give forth an image of invisible thought'. While Glass Tears has the stylised, melodramatic appearance of a still from a silent film, the image poses questions of permanence and transience and the sentimentality of human sorrow. Photograph: Man Ray
Max Dupain was drawn to notions of the known and unseen and the way that portraiture could be a vehicle for both exposure and discretion. His portrayal of art critic Leon Gellert invites speculation on the opportunistic nature of the photographic portrait and the studied nature of its sculptural equivalent. Photograph: Max Dupain
Man Ray maintained that it was through the gaze of the old masters that he understood how to portray people: 'they knew drawing, perspective, staging … I admired the respect with which they reproduced the proportions of human features'. Yet Man Ray's own contribution to the genre was his willingness to set the model free from traditional representation and play with the effects of light and imagination—to imbue a sense of poetry or mystery. Photograph: Man Ray
The advancements of 'new photography' presented Max Dupain with an 'exciting array of options' for his practice, both technical and attitudinal. He experimented widely with its favoured techniques, but also with transposing imagery to create pictures that transcended the rational and everyday, as seen in this photomontage. Photograph: Max Dupain
The 1920s and 30s saw a significant shift for photography across the globe as artists pioneered new ways of looking through the viewfinder and exaggerated formal relationships, fragmented imagery, and relied less on narrative or naturalism. The cropped hand of this image, disassociated from its body or any graspable context, at once recalls the incompleteness of a broken classical sculpture and the surreality of a dream. Photograph: Man Ray
In 1922 Man Ray published an album of 12 plates featuring a 'new procedure' he called 'rayography'. It involved placing objects on top of photosensitive paper and then exposing the paper to light very briefly in the darkroom. The white and paler areas of the print are where the objects rested, the darkest being the areas of space around them, creating an inverse image. Photograph: Man Ray
Max Dupain's investigations with camera-less photography honored Man Ray's—he even titled several of his prints 'rayographs'—but he also investigated extensions of the method by bringing figurative imagery into the photogram's abstract field, and further exploring ambiguous scale and depth. Photograph: Max Dupain
Max Dupain was one of the first Australian artists to take a serious interest in Surrealism. Shattered Intimacy adopts three revered surrealist tropes: the motif of the displaced classical figure — here a miniature replica of Discobolus — the discordant tableaux of unconnected objects, and the mysterious possibilities of unnatural lighting effects. The result is a glimpse into an alternative dimension.
Photograph: Max Dupain