ABSTRACT
In this chapter the author uses structuralist tools to analyse the importance of photography within the Surrealist project of registering ‘the marvellous’. In 1925 Andre Breton began to examine the subject surrealism and painting, and from the outset he characterized his material in terms of the very twin poles - automatism and dream - and the subject matter of William Rubin’s later definition. Breton introduces ‘Surrealism and Painting’ with a declaration of the absolute value of vision among the sensory modes. The privileged place of vision in surrealism is immediately challenged by a medium given a greater privilege: namely, writing. Psychic automatism is itself a written form, a ‘scribbling on paper,’ a textual production. And when it is transferred to the domain of visual practice, as in the work of Andre Masson, automatism is no less understood as a kind of writing. The surrealist photographers rarely used photomontage.
