ABSTRACT
According to Mitsuda, it is through an interest in photo-collage among Japanese artists associated with Surrealism that blurring of distinctions between art and photography started to take place during the decade. The word ‘ocean’ from the first cut-out possibly references Breton’s photo-poem from 1935, featuring the phrase L’Océan glacial that stands for an ‘icy ocean’, but also the Arctic Ocean on the front of a tobacco packaging. The Unsilvered Mirror uses two photographs of Charles James’s opera capes taken by the British photographer Cecil Beaton in 1936, originally published in Vogue. The only two ways, for Yamanaka, by which surreality, or what he terms as ‘the inner reality laying behind the external’, could be brought forward by the means of the camera are photo-collage and photo-object, the former revolutionizing painting and the latter revolutionizing sculpture. Yamanaka was first introduced to Surrealism in his French classes at school, approached Éluard with intention of translating his work into Japanese after Pari Tokyo.
