93. Surreal

For the past two weeks I have listened to my students whine (and I do mean whine) about their current assignment - Surrealism. This photography class is a great class - historically one of my favorites with not only very talented students in the class, but also truly dedicated ones. But the whining is getting to me.

The assignment is to create three surrealist images. Of course I defined the movement for them and we looked at many, many surrealist images. We talked about different ways to approach the project and then I gave them three weeks to work on it. The critique should be tomorrow, but a mutiny occurred in class and the students now have a one day extension on it. I could have overruled them, but if that many students weren't ready for critique, they weren't ready. So as a teacher I remained flexible, made some modifications to the schedule, and let them have their extension.

The problem is most the students are over thinking it. In Susan Sontag's famous text On Photography she claims photography itself is inherently surrealism, "Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise, in the very creation of a duplicate world, of a reality in the second degree, narrower but more dramatic than the one perceived by natural vision." Just by the mere fact that it freezes time, from one unique angle, reproducible, and often accidental. Sontag argues that the card-carrying Surrealist (those who bought into the Manifesto) paled in their contrived approach to capture the surreal. But it is simply the medium itself that is needed to capture the surreal. She sites so many wonderful photographers to illustrate the points of her groundbreaking essay, and Henri Lartigue is one of those perfect examples. His photographs taken as a young child were some of his most popular. And without knowing anything about the Surrealist Manifesto this child embraces the surrealist approach. How was he so successful while others struggled? Lartigue wasn't over thinking it. He embraced the media, he embraced the accident, he thought outside the box (like most children), and he transformed the ordinary into something extraordinary.

Jacques Henri Lartigue