Averyanova O.N. —
Between the photography and art. Certain aspects of publication “Photography is Not an Art”. Man Ray/André Breton (1937)
// Man and Culture. – 2019. – ¹ 3.
– P. 54 - 63.
DOI: 10.25136/2409-8744.2019.3.26500
URL: https://en.e-notabene.ru/ca/article_26500.html
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Abstract: This article is dedicated to the analysis of a small album “Photography is Not an Art” created in 1937 by the French painter and photographer of American descent Man Ray in collaboration with the leader of surrealism André Breton. The selection of images and their inscriptions along with the poetic preamble of Breton represent a distinct artistic concept, which yet remains insufficiently studied and open for multiple interpretations. The study explores a number of questions related to the discourse on the art of photography, which gained relevance due to the growing interest of avant-garde artists, as well as the attitude to this topic of one of the prominent representatives of modernism. Attention is focused on the unique visual row in the context of creative ideas of the 1930’s: Dadaism, surrealism, and “new thingness”. The scientific novelty consists in presentation of the author’s original conclusions on correlation between the personal aesthetic program of an artist and cultural practices of the era. Rhetoric and semantics of photography as a “specific art” is associated with its unique descriptive ability to be not just straightforward and truthful, but also ambiguous and illusory. The album images actually demonstrate the possibility to make visible something that does not belong to the row of visible, and thus notional. The author concludes that a “banal”, often not deserving particular attention of the researchers Man Ray series of photographs is not secondary, and the project itself, brought to life by a modernist artist possessing a high level of competence in the area of cultural marketing, demonstrates a new specificity of “creative production, its relevance to aesthetic, ideological, or commercial visual model.