Surrealism attempts to bring the illogic of the dream to the waking world. In this attempt the traditional association of absurdity with our sleeping-lives is broken. Absurdity floods the ‘real’ world.
Cutting through cultural contexts, absurdity is the closest thing we have to a universal truth. When the context of the everyday, the social world, breaks down, breaks out of itself, each situation, no matter how different or mundane, is revealed to contain the germ of a singular truth. This truth recognizes reality as it has been shaped by the social world and the depths of that reality beyond the limitations of convention.
Everything is suspect, nothing is safe. We are entering a realm past morality, past history; a realm in which the seeming totalities of morality and history are but facets of a much larger picture. The best that can be done is to try and see it as it flits past. Colors and lines and form; in a word, composition. Photography.
Because the instant is the context, photography can access the absurd. In a flash, the form of the world is revealed. The photographer plays the crucial role in this drunken dance. The whole fabric of fate and karma which has determined the course of their lives, including the minutiae of where they stand and how high they hold their camera, all combine to create the moment of the click, the millisecond in which chance and choice lock, merging beyond recognition.
-M.C. Newton & Dani Bogenhagen
Cutting through cultural contexts, absurdity is the closest thing we have to a universal truth. When the context of the everyday, the social world, breaks down, breaks out of itself, each situation, no matter how different or mundane, is revealed to contain the germ of a singular truth. This truth recognizes reality as it has been shaped by the social world and the depths of that reality beyond the limitations of convention.
Everything is suspect, nothing is safe. We are entering a realm past morality, past history; a realm in which the seeming totalities of morality and history are but facets of a much larger picture. The best that can be done is to try and see it as it flits past. Colors and lines and form; in a word, composition. Photography.
Because the instant is the context, photography can access the absurd. In a flash, the form of the world is revealed. The photographer plays the crucial role in this drunken dance. The whole fabric of fate and karma which has determined the course of their lives, including the minutiae of where they stand and how high they hold their camera, all combine to create the moment of the click, the millisecond in which chance and choice lock, merging beyond recognition.
-M.C. Newton & Dani Bogenhagen
Tuscany, Italy, 7/93
Europe, 5/86
Europe, 7/87
Europe, 7/87
France, 7/88
France, 7/89
Italy, 7/90
Portugal, 7/96
Italy, 8/94
I'd say every photo here is perfect, and perhaps that's what gives each one a sense of the absurd.
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