Abstract:
This thesis explores the nature of the mirror in surrealist photography. Through the theoretical
doctrine of Surrealism’s founder André Breton, the mirror is understood as a symbol of
simultaneity, existing between states of contradiction that surrealist practitioners are tasked
with resolving. It is Breton’s paradigm of “a man cut in two by the window” that frames this
understanding of the mirror as the means through which oppositional boundaries may be
negotiated in the aim of finding alternative, higher forms of signification. However, to traverse
such bounds is to find oneself fragmented, “cut in two.” Mirrored surrealist photography –
where the mirror can be both subject and surface – depicts the fracturing effects of the diffusion
of difference, all that is set within the picture frame rent asunder. Using an art historical
methodology, this thesis explores the work of eight photographers associated with or
influenced by Surrealism and their use of the mirror through four contradictions of artist and
machine, real and imagined, self and other, self and selves. The work of Florence Henri (1893-
1982) and Man Ray (1890-1976) are first examined through the artist and machine dichotomy,
both photographers seeking to frame themselves as both artist and machine to counter artistic
hierarchy and photographic automatism that ridicule the notion of photographer as artist.
Secondly, street photography by Eugène Atget (1857-1927) and Brassaï (1899-1984) are
analysed through the real and imagined binary, their works locating the reality in surreality
through their depictions of a flattened and fantastical Paris. The photography of André Kertész
(1894-1985) and Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) tackles the binary of self and other, their distorting
photographs of female forms designed to render woman the object of male self-knowledge.
And finally, Claude Cahun (1894-1954) and Marcel Moore’s (1892-1972) collaborative project
Disavowals will be looked at as a denial of self-knowledge, Cahun and Moore playing with the
space between self and selves through mirrored logic to disturb the idea that identity can ever
be fixed. The mirror in surrealist photography produces a dialogue between oppositions,
illustrating the central significance of the object to the surrealist mission.