Description: David Bate examines automatism and the photographic image, the Surrealist passion for insanity, ambivalent use of Orientalism, use of Sadean philosophy and the effect of fascism of the Surrealists. The book is illustrated wtih a wide range of surrealist photographs.
Brief description: David Bate is Reader in Photography and Course Leader of the MA Photographic Studies programme at the University of Westminster, UK and a photographer. His theoretical writings include the book Photography and Surrealism and his photographic works have been exhibited in Europe and North America. He is co-editor of the journal Photographies
Review Quotes: ""David Bate provides a rich feast of carefully researched insights into how photographers of the Breton Circle in Paris understood their activities as deeply socially transformative. This is a much-needed work of scholarly restoration, which reconnects surrealism with its own repressed histories as an instrumental practice of cultural and political resistance. This book is a welcome antidote to popular notions of Surrealism as apolitical 'shock art' or as phallocentric and sexually exploitive.""--Deborah Bright