Photography By Hermin Abramovitch

Photography was an essential part of the Surrealist movement, as it could act as a visual method of free association. Many Surrealist photographers chose to work in this vein, literally shooting from the hip and taking photographs without framing the shot in the viewfinder first. Man Ray's work was more calculated than that; instead he chose to keep with the trend of cameraless photography. Ray made photographs following a similar process to that of Schad and Moholy-Nagy, but used different objects to form his compositions. Ray renamed the process once again, calling his works rayographs.
Man Ray also experimented with the process of solarization. The technique of solarization involves briefly exposing a print to a light source during development, which then produces reversed tones in the photograph. Other Surrealist photographers experimented with making normal banal subjects look extraordinary, while still others took straight photographs whose subject matter dealt with the idiosyncrasies of life. Two artists that worked in the later fashion are André Kertész and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Both Kertész and Cartier-Bresson looked to photograph moments in life when harmony existed, and Cartier-Bresson came to describe that critical time as "the decisive moment."