PURPOSE:  This website seeks to be preliminary critical survey that traces a possible alternate history of photomontage and fantastic photography, and the possible influences upon it.  It is not about the classic propagandist photomontage that juxtaposed elements in the manner of modernist graphic design. It only briefly touches on the surrealist photographers of the same period. It covers the post- Photoshop period.

This website is about a constructed tableaux photography that seeks a relatively coherent and blended co-presence of elements, often presenting these as an enigma in a stage-like space.  This 150-year old approach to visualising the fantastic is now flourishing in contemporary art photography, but it still has no name; and so I have provisionally termed it the "nu-real".

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Created: Summer 2008.
Version 1.4 beta.  Updated: 29th November 2010.

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nu-real : fantastic photomontage and its possible influences, 1857 — 2008.

  SOME have criticised erotic fantasy, anxious surrealism and dark fairy tales as being 'not part of people’s everyday experience' or 'alienating to ordinary people'.  This seems oddly evasive, since we all roam these terrains for hours in our dreams, each and every night.  During the construction of this timeline, it became hard to avoid the conclusion that this particular variety of photography has been frowned on ('too fantastic') or dismissed ('too ephemeral') or pointedly ignored ('politically suspect') precisely because it too often dances over deep social and erotic faultlines, and thus poses questions about matters that must remain taboo.  The practice seems to offer a potent means of bringing psychic injustice to light.  It is often the photographic practice of those who have been exiled in some way — politically, erotically, spiritually — it is about loss and the fervent nostalgia felt by the exile for a land or a dream-time that has faded into memory.

Sometimes, during times of political repression, this seems to have become mixed with a yearning for some enlightened future society and/or the overthrow of dogma.

  IS it, perhaps, aligned with the forces of the counter-enlightenment?  Some alert readers will note that I start the timeline with the year 1848, which has political as well as photographic significance. Yet this most liminal of approaches has almost never been fascist, and leftists and communists have always viewed it (unless the technique was used for propaganda) with the deep suspicion that it harboured anarchist tendencies.  In its dislike of censorship and doctrines, in its curious innocence, in its awareness of the strange visions lurking under the official veneer of reality, the closest political ally of this type of photography might indeed be anarchism — a creed which (in its less workerist varieties) has always had a place in its heart for the erotic outsider, the apostate jew and the metaphysical intellectual. And in one or more of those categories fall almost all of the historic practitioners of this particular art form, from Rejlander onwards.  This is also true of many of those who appear to have influenced it tangentally — from the realms of fiction, poetry, the stage and film.

  IS it, nevertheless, an elliptical picturing of suppressed hatred and anxious erotic fears?  Politically-engaged academics who have looked at surrealist works of the 1920s and 30s — such as Hal Foster and feminists using psychoanalysis — would say so, and thus are able to make the politically-convenient neutralising claim that there is "nothing innately subversive" (Foster) about photomontage.  But might not the surrealist experiments from the 1920s and 30s have partly been about a breaking-free from the vice-like grip of centuries of fanatical Catholic guilt and repression, and at a decisive moment in European history?  We might even see many extreme instances of photomontage as a kind of healing, a 'working-through' of the extreme modes of perception enforced by extreme identities placed under extreme historical pressures.

  NOW the world stands on the ruins of psychoanalysis, but the dream world won't conveniently depart.   Of course it won't — we live in it every night.   And now a new generation of creatives has grown up deeply immersed in fantasy narratives and art, despite the urgings of their teachers and a general neglect by contemporary galleries.   They are now staging a resurgence of the enigmatic fantastic.   Fantastic photomontage is a small aspect of that wider resurgence.