10

Photography and surrealism

11
Introduction
meanings attached to them vithin surrealism almost
completely.
Reading Photographs
1he spectators vill to tantasize is a component
problem tor the discussion ot any image or text. 1he
virtue ot surrealism is that it took this as a central issue
impinging on notions ot reality. One problem tor the
semiotic detnition ot photography in historical analysis
has been not just the categorizing ot a corpus, but the
structuralist model ot the sign employed to discuss it.
Indeed, it vas this problem that generally beset struc-
turalist analysis, precipitating the so-called crisis ot
the sign and vhat Anglo-American theorists called
poststructuralism.
I6
1he txed one-to-one relationship ot signitersigni-
ted in Saussurean linguistics could not be maintained,
since the signited kept sliding into another signiter
signited dovn a chain vhose only limits vere detned
by the tull stop. 1he inability ot the structuralist model
to accommodate the transience ot social meanings, the
process that Peirce called unlimited semiosis, led to an
interest in larger signitying units, ot utterances vithin
a context as discourse analysis.
I7
It vas no doubt tor
this reason that theorists turned to a rhetorical analysis
ot photographs and Hjelmslevs distinctions (as used by
Barthes, to distinguish denotation (the bare tacts ot the
picture, and connotation (as the cultural interpretations
ot it,, to consider photographs as constituting more ot
a discursive event than simply an utterance ot parole.
acques Durand argued: 1he rhetoricized image, in its
immediate reading is heir to the tantastic, the dream,
hallucinations: Metaphor becomes metamorphosis, rep-
etition, seeing double, hyperbole, gigantism, ellipsis,
levitation, etc.
I8
1he consequence ot this theory tor historians ot
images vas that those vho continued to situate the his-
torical meanings ot pictures only at a literal, descriptive
level ran the risk ot completely missing (repressing, the
connotative structure ot rhetorically tgurative meanings
ot images and their otten transgressive sense. A rhetorical
analysis ot photographs treated images as singular but
complex semiotic units and makes the analysis on
+o As Slavoj Zizek notes in
Looking Awry, Poststructuralism is
not something that exists as such
in lrance.
+; In linguistics, a discourse
analysis allovs both the construc-
tion ot regularities that go beyond
the sentence and, at the same
time, the possibility ot studying
the relations betveen these
regularities and the conditions ot
the production ot the text (Colin
McCabe, The Talking Cure [Basing-
stoke: Macmillan, +,:+|,
p. :oo,.
+: acques Durand, quoted
trom Communications (Vol. +
[+,;o|, pp. ;o,,, in Victor
Burgin (ed.,, Thinking Photography,
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, +,::,,
p. ;+.