Photography was the ideal medium

Photography was the ideal medium for the project in its vision of a seamless reality because in photography "space does not present itself to us as successive in nature, like time, but as pure presence, present-all-atonce ... photography normally functions as a kind of declaration of the seamlessness of reality itself as well as in the form of photo into painting." Brassai, as his prolific publications in Minotaure demonstrate, was seen as a particularly seamless photographer. Although unlike Breton, Brassai did not consider himself quintessentially Surrealist, and therefore declined the opportunity to become an official member of the group, philosophically he shared some of their tenets, most specifically, the sense of some (greater) truth, of the existence of an "essence" to be percieved from a collection of its many individual parts. As he explained in a 1921 letter to his parents, Brassai hoped in his photography "to express the essence of things." By the time his works were produced in Minotaure, he felt confident enough to claim in a 1935 letter that "a perfect whole is slowly emerging from the pictures I develop day after day (light and shadow, front stairs and back stairs, the 500-franc banquet and the cesspit)." Thus, through an objective(?) balance of light and dark, inside and outside, rich and poor, Brassai saw his photographs as containing a range, a breadth, that expresses a "whole," a "truth."

We might make the claim that in his almost realist inclusion of such a democratic range--of people, cityscapes and objects, Brassai can be seen as photographing, albeit from an exteriorized subject position, a sense of community--commonality is based on nothing greater than general geographic nearness to Paris. Brassai quantified this wholeness, this essence in more specific terms, however. He insisted that "nature is the foundation of every starting point, the line of progress is constant simplification, a purer and purer emphasis of the essential."

Whether Brassai conceived of this natural essence as truly associated with nature--an instinctual traditional conception of the earth, or as man's natural state--that of the Surrealist unconscious, is unclear, but it seems likely that it is through this emphasis on the "natural" that Brassai turned to the figure of the nude woman. After all, nature is traditionally and consistently coded as feminine. It is thus that we have chthonic conquest terminology of despoiling virgin lands or ravaging Mother Nature, where woman is conceived as intimately connected to the earth. Indeed, it was this quality that allowed poster artists to link woman's body with the national body. On the other hand, for the Surrealists, women "were not grounded in what is 'natural,' but rather, were subject to fantasy and fabrication."

But even if Brassai's vision of "nature" had more to do with the Surrealist unconscious, Surrealism focused on 'woman' as 'other', as closer to the unconscious than men. Woman was idealized--which is certainly nothing short of traditional--but for different reasons than traditional ones: the Surrealists loved woman for her irrationality, her spontaneity, and especially her passion--for everything about her opposed traditional values of reason, practicality, and logic, and thereby brought her closer to a state of unconscious, convulsive beauty. One might make the claim that the Surrealists of the 1920s and 1930s, so frequently critiqued by feminists for their objectification of and even violence upon the body of woman, paradoxically have much in common with the feminists of the 1970s, (who have, of course, borne the brunt of their own share of critiques for their essentialism). But as Rosalind Krauss points out, the idea of revaluing the signifiers of the feminine--which was, she claims, at the heart of the Surrealist project, "could at least prefigure a next step, in which a reading is opened onto deconstruction. It is for this reason... that the frequent characterizations of surrealism as antifeminist seem to ... be mistaken." Woman, whether tied to nature for traditional reasons or because she is closer to the unconscious based on Surrealist reasoning, was a natural place for Brassai to begin.

And nothing could be more natural than the simple, unmanipulated straight photographs, the two 1932-1933 Nus (Figs. 3, 4) published in Minotaure. They are Surrealist only in their positioning, such that they defamiliarize through "a simple rotation and consequent disorientation of the body." There is no collage or montage work used. Rather, the clipped torsos are posed in strange, unusual positions, consistent with Surrealist practice. On the one hand, these images are yet another cliche example of male objectification of the female body, simultaneously dismembered and decapitated by the violent cropping of the photographic frame, while the figures are sexualized in their flattering attention to the feminine torso, a site of viewer desire. The cropping of photographs severs the continuous fabric of reality. The frame, as in most Surrealist photographs, makes itself known as a sign--"an empty sign, it is true, but an integer in the calculus of meaning nonetheless, a signifier of signification."