This clear and challenging re-evaluation of the status and usage of photographic images in historical surrealism puts surrealism's fundamental issues back into the framework of its historical purpose and function. David Bate asks what a surrealist photograph actually is. He discusses automatism and the photographic image, the surrealist passion for insanity, their ambivalent use of Orientalism and adoption of Sadean philosophy and the effect of fascism on the surrealists. Locating the use of photography by surrealists within the cultural discourses of that historical moment, Photography...

In life 'after postmodernism', photography, cinema, television and the internet have all already changed the way we think about pictures. In this book, David Bate opens up a new vista for the discussion of photography. He offers fresh ways of approaching photography, showing how photographs circulate in an 'image world' that exists beyond their art and media origins. He argues that these images permeate people's minds as much as the environment and that photography has affected our sense of time and its relationship to memory. Moving beyond the melancholic realism of Roland Barthes' "Camera...