Re-Enchanting Photography: Contemporary Art and Surrealism

Unexpected dialogues between five contemporary artists and five seminal Surrealists that advance a fresh way of perceiving the world and considering periodization

Published with vis-à-vis series.

This illustrated critical reader highlights five contemporary photographers who refuse the supposed objectivity of their medium and instead adopt the conceptual framework of Surrealism. The volume pairs each photographer with a historical Surrealist artist, creating dialogues between their works: Viviane Sassen and Man Ray, Paul Kooiker and Hans Bellmer, Amie Dicke and Meret Oppenheim, Juul Kraijer and Max Ernst, Geert Goiris and Giorgio de Chirico. Through these couplings, Surrealism emerges as a transgressive mode of visual thinking, untethered to a specific period in time, that pursues a re-enchantment of the world.
Ernst van Alphen (born 1958) is a Dutch cultural analyst and a professor emeritus of literary studies at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. His publications include Seven Logics of Sculpture (2023) and Productive Archiving (2023), among others.