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July 14, 2009
I have a lot of respect for the old school photographer-- that is, the one who understands photography as a mode of expression and who works with large format camera, darkroom, contact prints, black and white film, toned prints and handcrafted books. This kind of analogue work is not for me.
A wonderful example is the Baltimore photographer Lauren E. Simonutti, also known as lauren.rabbit on Fickr. Her work references the surrealist stand of Hans Bellmer and Georges Bataille that explores 'the uncanny' or events ‘in which repressed material returns in ways that disrupt unitary identity, aesthetic norms and social order’:
Lauren E. Simonutti, Years End--the eye, 2008, from the series the madness is the method
The Surrealists’ untamed eye is first and foremost an inner eye that disrupts that modernism which celebrated hygiene, purity of line, functionalism and the supreme rationality of the machine. It is a current that sprang from the utterly inexplicable horrors of the trenches and works tin terms of a disrupted narrative in which events do not follow in a linear or logical manner.
The mid to late nineties saw Simonutti become intimately related to the world of medicine including intensive care, orthopedics, physical therapy, wheelchairs (primarily single arm propelled), adjustable dial leg braces, bone growth stimulation , titanium steel insertion rods and repeated reconstructive surgery, as the result of her rapid expulsion from the windshield of the car that ran her over as she was walking home on the Lower East Side.
Lauren E. Simonutti, wind 4x for goodbye, 2008, from the series the madness is the method
Recently returned from the dead Simonutti is in the process of piecing things and her life together. Throughout it all, events, injuries, individuals, dreams, nightmares, life, still life and visions of afterlife have been faithfully recorded, processed, printed and when necessary toned, painted or otherwise altered.
Currently Lauren is engaged in a battle with her fractured mind within wreck of a house in Baltimore which has become her primary model and largest body of work in progress thus far. The surrealism of this work refers to a concern to create a specific emotional response, one that challenges the viewer to embrace the world of the dream, the abject and the irrational.
If the desire within Breton's surrealism is to liberate the unconscious, to create room for the imagination, to confront the abject, to change the conditions of ordinary mundane reality, then Surrealism's darker side (Bataille) explores sadism and masochism, desire and death.
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The surrealists sought to render the waking world impossibly strange, so as to better speak (or whisper) to some larger subconscious continuity of images and experiences.
The reference may be to André Breton's article 'Surrealism and painting',
which set the emphasis on the figure of the 'untamed eye'