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Lining two walls in the back of the Syracuse University Art Museum are picture frames featuring captivating black and white photographs. A closeup of a woman’s face, a scenic alleyway and a dismantled sculpture visually introduce viewers to the Surrealist movement.

“We wanted to cast a wide net to show the global dissemination of this style and really its influence and its transformation,” Dr. Samuel T. Johnson, director of graduate studies in art history, said. “We’re looking at about a half a century of photographs.”

Led by Johnson and his team of art history graduate students, the “Surrealism and Photography: ‘Where I Dream, It is Awake’” exhibit showcases 15 pieces of photography spanning the 20th century from nine artists across the globe. Graduate students in HOA 655: Proseminar in Graduate Research Methods and Scholarly Writing curated the exhibit for their final project.

For the semester-long course, the art history master’s program students worked with Johnson to put together a checklist of artifacts to consider for the exhibit. They selected the current pieces throughout this past fall semester. Each student focused on the selection process for one of the artists in the show, Johnson said.

With their choices, the students aimed to tell the stories of the Surrealist movement through photographs, exploring how it manifested itself for different artists experiencing social movements around the world.

Through the parameters of the study, the students explored themes of the Surrealist movement, ranging from Sigmund Freud’s beliefs of social liberation to the sexualization of art. The movement stems from social upheaval and the overthrowing of many restrictive governments, such as the Russian and Mexican Revolutions. Artists from the beginning of World War I through World War II were reimagining the purpose of art and pushing the limits of its social purpose, Johnson said.

To begin their journeys in understanding each photograph, they inspected the details of each piece to understand the artistry in relation to the context.

“There was a lot of looking, standing, tilting heads and squinting to really grasp what we were looking at,” Jada Saleeby, a master’s student in art history and one of the curators, said. “It was really fun to see the photogrtaphs in person.”

The team accessed resources through Bird Library’s Special Collections Research Center. The staff at Bird Library and the SU Art Museum worked tirelessly to pull artifacts and think through them together, making sense of the art through long nights of research, Saleeby said.

The students had access to a wide variety of photographs, with some being extremely central to the Surrealist movement and others being adjacent to it. The SCRC provided the team with a wide selection of first edition Surrealist books and periodicals, which further aided the study, Johnson said.

Solange Jain | Photo Editor

Black and white photographs in Syracuse University’s Art Museum represent the surrealist period. The images are part of the exhibit, “Surrealism and Photography: ‘Where I dream, It is Awake.’”

Kate Holohan, a curator for SU Libraries, provided the class with information on the photographs and artist’s biographies, Saleeby said.

Through the program’s resources, the students were given room to experiment hands-on while learning about the process of curating an exhibition, Hannah Payne, another student curator, said.

The students inspected the work of the photographers through a Surrealist lens. Saleeby was assigned two images by Mexican artist Manuel Álvarez Bravo that focused on the treatment of the human body in art.

A frequently explored theme in Surrealism was the female body and how it was often fractured to suit psychological desires, Saleeby said. Before the Surrealist movement, these topics often weren’t given a platform.

“It was really one of the first avant-garde movements to take sexuality on in a direct way, and to focus on rethinking what was normal,” Johnson said.

Em Spencer shared similar sentiments when examining their artist, Eikoh Hosoe. Hosoe, a Japanese artist, has two photographs featured in the exhibit, both centering on the human form and its fragmentation, Spencer said. The high contrast of the composition paired with the fragmented body creates discomfort for viewers, something that Surrealism often aimed to do, they said.

Nick Vernon, another student curator, examined these themes as well. He was assigned a book from the SCRC that focused on French photographer Claude Cahun’s work. Her pieces examine gender stereotypes and neutrality leading up to the French “New Woman” movement, Vernon said.

Many of the photographers and artists featured in the show didn’t intend to be part of the Surrealist movement, but because of the social contexts surrounding their creations, their work fits into the category.

Payne said the artist she worked with, Denise Bellon, was an independent photojournalist, but because she photographed Surrealist artists, she connected with the movement. Similarly, André Kertész, a Hungarian photographer who’s also featured in the exhibit, didn’t directly consider himself as part of the movement, but was still published in Surrealist journals.

To present the purpose and effect of the Surrealist movement, the graduate team found it vital to represent a global perspective. As the students reflected, they featured artists from the countries of Mexico, France, Germany and Japan, where the themes of each photograph were underscored by historical events.

Photos by Bravo aimed to address the sociopolitical climate of Mexico City in its post-revolution period. One photo featured a broken statue originally erected to commemorate Mexico’s 100 years of independence from Spain, Saleeby said.

When viewing the exhibit at a more poetic level and diving into the symbolic imagery of the pieces, Freud’s ideas of the human psyche and the absurd nature of Surrealism come to the surface. Freud asserted there is a part of our psyche that is unknown to us and repressed, only existing in our dreams, Johnson said.

The Surrealist movement was a breakthrough of government restrictions and the human mind’s own limitations, Johnson said. Many of the photographers found ways to represent the world of the unknown through their artistic processes, like by doubling certain shots, Vernon said.

To understand the exhibition’s themes of Surrealism in today’s world, it’s important to understand how the movement’s legacy has evolved, Johnson said. At its inception, Surrealism was seen as radical and liberating, but now its values may seem rather conservative and reflect sexism and homophobia. The movement has a long legacy that spans back 100 years, so the world’s definition of “progressive” has vastly changed since then.

Because of today’s evolving technological advancements and historical happenings, photography is vital to capture moments in time. While the world rapidly transforms, exhibits such as these allow people to see a reflection of our own times in a different historical moment, presenting events as a commentary rather than a glorification, Johnson and Saleeby said.

“The Surrealist movement today still has a lot to give us as far as learning experiences are concerned, when it comes to the whole understanding of our own human psyche,” Vernon said.

Published on March 4, 2025 at 11:08 pm