ABSTRACT
This chapter explores correspondences in Mina Loy's work with Surrealism's visual practices. Surrealism's international and interarts impact drew from avant-garde venues that Loy either published in or knew from her associations with artists. Parisian Surrealist periodicals convey the stylistic and aesthetic multiplicity of Surrealist photography. Surrealist photography's bountiful preference for female images, especially the many nude images that dominate its visual palette, is particularly instructive to considering modern technologies of specularity referenced across Loy's poetry, especially through figures of female bodies. Surrealist devices include "close cropping, extreme angles, raked lighting, mirror distortions, double exposures, montage and solarization", often becoming "expressive mediums of psychic conflict". The various visual images suggest a common vocabulary linking fashion, the female body, and a threat of violence elucidated in Loy's poem. The violence done by the fashion industry to the female body registers on the body of the worker and the consumer.
