The Sorcerers Apprentice -- Animating the Inanimate

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About The Sorcerers Apprentice -- Animating the Inanimate

"Taking as my point of departure a childhood memory in which a mahogany veneer panel opposite my bed had played the role of optical stimulus for a vision while I was half asleep, and finding myself in an inn at the seashore on a rainy day, I was struck by the way that my eyes were obsessively irritated by the ceiling, whose cracks had been accentuated by many cleanings. I then decided to question the symbolism of this obsession, and to aid my reflective and hallucinatory faculties, I got a series of designs out of the boards by randomly covering them in sheets of paper that i began rubbing with a lead pencil. I emphasise the fact that the designs thus obtained progressively lose -- through a series of suggestions and transmutations that occur spontaneously, as happens with hypnagogic visions -- the character of the material (wood) being questioned and take on the appearance of images of an unexpected preciseness and probably of such a nature as to reveal the prime cause of the obsession or to produce a simulacrum of this cause. My curiousity being aroused and struck with amazement, i came to use the same method to question all sorts of materials that happened to enter my visual field: leaves and their veins, the ravelled edges of a piece of sacking, the knife strokes of a modern painting, a thread unwound from a spool, etc ... Later, by restricting my own active participation more and more so as to enlarge the active part of the faculties of the mind, I came to be present like a spectator at the birth of pictures...."

This quotation from surrealist artist Max Ernst is used by Andre Breton in his lecture titled "SURREALIST SITUATION OF THE OBJECT - Situation of the Surrealist Object", delivered in Prague in 1935, sums up the purpose for this group.

We seek those abstract photographs which, like pencil rubbings of textured surfaces, reveal images of unexpected precision other than the surface being photographed.

We seek those photographs which give birth to landscapes (from earth or elsewhere), creatures (real and fantastic), figures (human and alien), cities and machinery (past, present and future). In short we search for life or animation, captured in a still photograph of the inanimate.

One could call this "figurative abstraction" or "pictorial abstraction" or even "surrealist". We don't mind what you call it so long as it is a photograph that resembles landscapes, figures, creatures, faces etc within an abstract composed of tones, colours, shapes, line, pattern, texture, light, dark.

This is not the place for your geometric abstract photographs, or formless abstract photographs. Nor is it the place for created artworks such as drawings, paintings, digital art or heavily manipulated, post processed photography. This is a place for beautiful and evocative photography in which the photographer has FOUND and EXTRACTED an image, other than the real, from materials which have entered his visual field and subsequently the field of the camera lens.

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