Surrealism

• Surreal photography is about creating a world or image which goes beyond the physical world as we know it.
• Man Ray is a well-known surrealist photographer, who also created photograms (photographs created with no camera). The techniques he used were solarisation, double exposures, montages, and combination printing. 
  
• Another notable photographer, Maurice Tabard, also used these techniques to create surrealist images.

• Hans Bellmer was a photographer, best known for his unsettling photographs of mechanical dolls which he made himself. 
  
• Dora Maar was notable for her Portrait of Ubu, the subject of which she never disclosed. The image itself is strange and unusual, and while it may be grotesque, continues to fascinate a wide audience. It is an example of surrealist photography with no effects like double exposure or solarisation. 
  
• Erik Johansson is a Swedish photographer who uses post-production techniques to create surrealist images which are beautiful and dreamy. 
  
• Christopher McKenney also creates surrealist images using post-production techniques, but his photographs have a darker theme; they often feature a partly covered human body, de-saturated colour tones, and are typically shot in the middle of the woods or on a back-country road.
  
• Stephen Criscolo is a self-taught photographer whose images seem to be from an entirely fictional planet created within his own mind. Jellyfish and planets are both reoccurring themes in Criscolo’s work, along with images that tend to be monochromatic in colour.