Marko Ristic, The Death of A Photographer, Without Measure, Belgrade 1928

Since the appearance of the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Monny de Boully, Dusan Matic and Marko Ristic primarily, and then also other members of the group of Serbian Surrealists, intensively followed and at times were part of French Surrealist streams. That is why Ristic was able to foresee that Nadja, Breton’s first novel, would be illustrated by photographs. In the survey The Jaws of Dialectics, to the question: “If you believe in miracles, is it any consolation to you… |” after giving an affirmative reply, Ristic adduced an example from his own experience: “It is all the same to me that it will seem trivial and ridiculous… but let it be recorded here once again as an example that signs of miracles should be sought outside major inscenations… that, having no indication that it would really be so, one evening in the early summer of 1928, I said in front of the ‘Ruski car’ (cafe) that Nadja would be illustrated by photographs, only to see for myself that it was indeed illustrated by photographs the following morning when I unexpectedly received it.”120 Thus, it was like a miracle but also as a necessity that Ristic understood the photographs of Jacques André Boiffard in Breton’s book, which had, as Benjamin also wrote: ’achieved a genuine creative synthesis of an artistic novel with a documentary novel.’121

In connection with the photographs of the streets of Paris published in Nadja, Ristic, like Benjamin, laid special emphasis on their documentary nature as an exceptional quality of this novel. He thought that it was “not unimportant” that these very photographs had appeared, since “photographs as signs of the truthful, everyday, documentary, undisguised and real, are linked to the surreal.” However, as these photographs are “ordinary, but hallucinatory with their subdued eloquence, they only indicate that the surreal is immanent in the real.” 122 Ergo, like their other contemporaries, the Serbian Surrealists knew that photography had that rare ability of discovering and documenting atypical and irrational aspects of concrete objects and phenomena. Like automatic writing it, too, can capture visions, dreams and hallucinations, sometimes with just one spontaneous push on the button of the camera. For that very reason, Surrealists in Paris, Belgrade or Prague, gave it a prominent place among the visual arts. In addition, even when it appears in Nadja, or somewhat earlier in The Public Bird, in The Impossible and in Surrealism Here and Now, or when it is created independently from other projects, the photograph does not repeat and reflect the action of a novel, poem or song, nor the isolated thoughts of poetic language, but is an autonomous work of art, like a picture or a print.

Some of Nikola Vuco’s earliest photographs, of which only Krov nad prozorom (The Roof Above the Window) can be said with certainty to date back to 1926, were prepared as the documentary complement to the long poem bearing the same name by his brother, Aleksandar Vuco, which was published that same year. Some other photographs, saved in his small Parisian photo–album, could have been made a while earlier, because he came to Paris in 1921, where (according to his recollections from 1988) he first met Philippe Soupault. It is important to point out that Nikola Vuco’s first Surrealist photographs, as well as Marko Ristic’s collages, were created in Paris, and in 1926 at that, namely only two years after the Surrealist Manifesto, which formulated the program and cognitive objectives of this avant–garde movement, had been published.

When he took up photography, Nikola Vuco, a student of law and philosophy in Paris, often proceeded from familiar and well–known topics which he discovered in his brother’s poetry (Aleksandar Vuco’s poem – The Roof Above the Window), or, being an accomplished piano player, in music. The Roof Above the Window and Beethoven I and II are therefore to be considered his earliest preserved photographs. He introduced a sense of time continuity and the dynamics of movement, typical qualities of music, into the frozen structure of the photographic image, employing purely photographic devices: the doubling of takes on the same negative or the overlapping of two different negatives. In that way he achieved the optical effect of double exposure, i.e., a layered representation of a double picture fixing different time intervals. A piano key-board passes through a plaster mask of Beethoven, while, in another one, a guitar is repeatedly multiplied like a reverberation or echo of the basic visual form. Eiffel’s tower is dematerialized and doubled as a lacy tower “of ashes and dreams”. And, like the “extirpation of words from the usual context becomes the result of the conscious effort to represent life as a fact defying logic,”123 so were the extraction of objects from a holistic representation of the world, the overlapping of fragmentary images of different things, just part of the photographic arsenal Nikola Vuco used in evolving towards Surrealist photography.

His favourite was the procedure of doubling which he varied and combined: as double exposure, a mirror image, reflections in a rear–view mirror or the polished surface of a table, coupled with recurring sequences of small balls and bricks or lace ornaments. The doubling, as the foundation of the picture, was designed before the photograph was taken, as a matter of concept, and not achieved subsequently as the result of complicated manipulation in the darkroom.124

One of the most important program texts of the Belgrade Surrealists, By the Way, was published in the 1930 almanac Nemoguce–L’impossible. It is accompanied only by Nikola Vuco’s photographs and a photogram by Vane Bor, because they are just as important as the text. They are program works in Serbian Surrealist art. Hence, the foreword to the text is marked by Bor’s photogram – Untitled¸ which is followed by Nikola Vuco’s photographs: Zid agnosticizma (The Wall of Agnosticism), Mi nemamo koga da ubedjujemo (We Need Not Convince Anyone) and The Arrested Flight of Surreality. The photogram with the broken pieces of glass visually heralds the rebellion, outrage and revolt of Surrealism against petty bourgeois reality. That photogram and Vuco’s mentioned photographs form a whole – the visual program of Serbian Surrealism. The same positions as advanced in the text By the Way are related by the language of the photograph. Marko Ristic gave the photographs their titles, seeking to coordinate the representation of the textual and visual levels of Surrealist poetry in the almanac The Impossible. Only photographs unassociated with the key contributions could remain without titles in Serbian Surrealism publications. According to Ristic, such photographs were “open, denuded ideas” which were in unobstructed communication with the spiritual eye of the spectator.

If we analyze each of these pictures–manifestos separately, then the photograph The Wall of Agnosticism has the most important function. It was created during Vuco’s stay in Paris, that is, a year before The Impossible came out. Ristic chose it because precisely this photograph visualises the “wall” which stood between the Surrealists and representatives of the bourgeois culture. The Legacy of Marko Ristic, recently classified and opened to researchers, also contains two letters from Nikola Vuco, in one of which he writes: “I can’t wait to send you my latest production, if this meagre quantity can be called a production ... Of them, I am sure that you will like the ’lined up hollow bricks or the hollow brick wall’ the best< I like that picture very much (I am bragging), and if it is accepted for the almanac, I think it will be much nicer if it is blown up to its page format so that it covers a whole page.”125 Although the photograph The Wall of Agnosticism was not blown up as much as its author had wanted it to be, it was nevertheless given a prominent, central place in the text and on the page. Its visual message could be read in keeping with the Surrealist position according to which “automatic writing is to invisible objects what photography is to visible ones.”126

The singling out of multiplied object structures from the world of reality in The Wall of Agnosticism has some similarities with Duchamp’s concept of the readymade but is equally a process through which the Surrealist photograph establishes the syntax of its own language. Basically, the process is typical of the development of language in general, as the doubling of syllables results in a meaning, like in the well–known example when pa is just senseless babbling, and papa a word. Nikola Vuco analyzes this problem of building visual meaningful structures in several variants: sometimes proceeding from stacks of plates, and sometimes from the regular circles of crystals on a chandelier or beads on a table. The same visual effects are achieved by cascading terraces or the rhythm of alternating doors and windows on facades photographed with an abrupt shortening of perspective. On the basis of the photographic image which excises a segment of reality, according to the theory of Rosalind Krauss, in front of a camera multiplied objects, i.e., bricks, behave as material of which a picture is built. The Wall of Agnosticism, then, is not just a set of more or less recognizable building elements but a visual metaphor of agnosticism which refers to the opaque wall raised both between the spectator and the world and also between Surrealism and the bourgeois milieu. That picture cogently supports Rosalind Krauss’ thesis on the exceptional capacity of the Surrealist photograph to articulate a “language effect”. The sequencing of shapes, their regular repetition and multiplication results in a meaningful visual whole, which can to a certain extent be likened to the process of formation of meaning in all linguistic structures.127

The initial realistic–mimetic relationship between the photograph and the world is so suppressed and blurred by the “language effect” in The Wall of Agnosticism as to almost call in question the sheer recognizability of the object – rows of bricks.128 In Nikola Vuco’s photographs, as well as in those of other Surrealists, the photographer’s design is not exhausted with the representation of an object or a specific situation. For them, photographing is a “magical act” unearthing the secret substance of visible phenomena. That is to say, recognition of the rows of bricks on Vuco’s photograph The Wall of Agnosticism, the newspaper kiosk in We Need Not Convince Anyone, or the shattered glass bottle and tombstones in the works of Vane Bor, is not what the sense and meaning of these photographs is about. The visual message is behind the curtain of perception, and it is only the act of photography that articulates it as a metaphor or symbol. Although it sometimes seems that the motifs have been randomly or accidentally selected, one should be aware that behind their photographic image stands the subconscious, i.e., the inner model and automatic dictation of thought. In addition, the deceptive state of ordinariness of the photographed objects actually points to the Surrealist position according to which hidden forces are at work in nature itself also. Thanks to them, relationships among things are veiled with curtains, which only partly hint at another, “hidden reality”, namely surreality.

If the photograph The Wall of Agnosticism shoulders part of the burden of explaining cognitive methods, then We Need Not Convince Anyone should have participated in the defense of the program planks of Surrealism. Since there can be no photograph without light, perhaps the opposite is also true, so that we can say that there can be no real picture of light without photography. Namely, their marked interest in light–dark relationships led some authors, like Herbert Read, to emphasize the ideological similarity between Romanticism and Surrealism.129 Surrealist photography also fits well into this context, since for it, night and not day was the preferred picture–taking time. We Need Not Convince Anyone belongs to that type of photograph taken by night and is by no means an isolated example among Vuco’s extant negatives. He recorded the atmosphere in the deserted streets of Belgrade in 1930, like Boiffard had some time earlier, taking photographs of Paris by night for Breton’s Nadja. Many other Surrealists, like Brassai or Man Ray, also took photographs of deserted city sections with a strong feeling of tension between light and dark. In them the contours of real things acquired the blurred contours of dreams and partial lighting led to discontinuity in perceiving objects. Severing thus the logical bonds with reality, normally existing in continued observation in daylight, photographs taken by night are similar to frozen pictures of dreams.130 Their mimetic representation is lost and vanishes together with the sounds of reality – pictures of known landscapes reveal hallucinatory visions of the surreal, and the metaphysical symbols of night, once close to the Romanticists, have been revived with Surrealism and Surrealist photography.131

Vuco successfully built up an atmosphere of dream and riddle in many photographs but only to one of them – The Arrested Flight of Surreality – did Ristic give a central place in the almanac The Impossible. It is well–known that all earlier research of Serbian Surrealism emphasized that it was precisely this photograph that was the password and motto of the Belgrade Surrealist group.132 In a single breath as it were, it synthesizes the ideas and program principles of Surrealism in Serbia in its heyday. The photograph The Arrested Flight of Surreality and not a drawing, picture or verse was entrusted with stating the avant–garde positions of the movement, like a coat–of–arms or emblem, through visual language means. Only this photograph was given such a privileged place: it is on the cover page of the almanac Nemoguce – L’impossible and again at the end. It is the alpha and omega of The Impossible.

Apart from the photograph The Arrested Flight of Surreality, no other work, either poetic or visual, was published twice on the pages of the almanac. Incidentally, we should mention that the name of Nikola Vuco is not among the signatories of the manifesto for formally he was not a member of the Surrealist fraternity. But, we should bear in mind that Vuco, as the author of not only those photographs published in the almanac but also of many others, closely cooperated with Ristic,133 which could lead to the conclusion that he was the official photographer as it were in Serbian Surrealism. Actually, his place within the heterogeneous Belgrade group could be compared to that of Man Ray in the French Centrale. This exceptional status was not reserved only for Vuco but for photography in general, and was accorded it only in the framework of French and then also of Serbian Surrealism. The photograph The Arrested Flight of Surreality was, thus, deliberately chosen as the cornerstone in exploring the irrational: “No, It has not been named, and we who know the password and the reply of any sense, we will never sufficiently name It. Before that, we had to speak, to speak more, drunk and rid of words which have only here stopped being miserable signs, bleak insipid symbols and pitiful means of communication (of whom| and between whom|)< transformed words are only here full reality, the arrested flight of surreality.” 134 The title of the photograph and its structure of a picture–password were a “fine formula” for succinctly expressing the intention of the group of Serbian Surrealists to capture areas on the “ultimate outposts of reason.”135

Nikola Vuco changed the conventional relationship between the photograph and reality – he allowed it to double and multiply objects, to cut out and decompose photographed wholes, blow up individual fragments to the verge of recognizability and also to devote itself to building a picture within a picture. In any case the leitmotif of the epoch is “a picture within a picture” or a “window picture”, i.e., everything already known as the experience of metaphysical painting.136 Photographers, including Nikola Vuco, expanded and radicalized the technical devices employed by Surrealist painters. They achieved equally convincing effects of uncertainty and tension, and, in addition, intensified and multiplied the contradictions between picture and reality. In different ways Surrealist photographers called in question the very world of visible facts, its real and tangible aspect, as the sole one photography deals with. The taking of a photograph of a woman’s mirrored image or of the mere reflections of an object in a misty window pane, like Vuco did, deepened the breach and unease in the continuity of perception because the picture simultaneously presented different levels of reality.

The photograph The Arrested Flight of Surreality confirms the thesis that Surrealist photography actually is not concerned with documentarity nor seeks to represent visible relationships among objects, but is, above all, interested in an artificial, constructed and staged reality. Among the extant negatives by Nikola Vuco there are several other works which intentionally challenge habitual perceptions of reality, such as the one with a net in front of a woman’s face or a double image in the mirror. Particularly interesting is a photograph dealing not only with a picture within a picture but also a complex system of shadows, namely Untitled, from 1930, showing a man photographed from the back in counter–light, holding above his head a mirror with the image of a man en face, who in turn, hands upraised, holds another mirror, perhaps. This meticulously designed inscenation develops a frame containing at least three persons and a mirror: first there is the photographer, then the man shown in counter–light, like a shadow, while the third man appears as a reflection in the mirror. The third man, like in Welles’ famous film by the same name, exists only as a reflection, a mirror –image. The photograph – Untitled – from 1930, proceeds from the same concept as The Arrested Flight of Surreality, and both are perfect examples of quasi–film direction, they are a picture of a performance in front of a camera designed in advance.

In the context of Surrealist art, but also somewhat earlier, for instance Giorgio de Chirico, but, primarily Ernst, Dali, Magritte, Miró and many others, considered playing with shadows an untapped field of free associations and visual experimentation.137 The shadow cast by a bird cage or the mysterious shading of a woman sitting in an armchair dematerialize the representation of reality in a distinct way in Vuco’s photographs. These are elements which at the semiological level of the picture, according to Rosalind Krauss, do not function as a sign but as an index. “The index is a sign that is less the representation of an object than the effect of an event. Smoke is caused by fire< cast shadow by the sun.”138 The photograph changed the common semiological status of shadow, for, as we have seen in the described example of inscenation, it does not point only to the presence of the real subject, but together with the cast shadow or the reflection in the mirror, proceeds to a higher level of representing reality. In fact a new system of representation evolves, in which several different spheres of reality intermingle, one of which necessarily in the documentary photograph realm and not left to the imagination of the artist. It was this very element that made photographic optics equally convincing and objective both when representing reality and when intending to arrest surreality.

Building a Surrealist visual structure, the photograph of Surrealism abandoned the old, well –known, sophisticated play of shadows employed by pictorialism, and turned to new and uncertain experiments. The change of the set of values and the new category of convulsive and not traditional beauty, accounts for the boldness of Vuco’s staged frames and his complex game with shadows and reflections in mirrors and car lights. All this caused the viewer discomfort as he could not tell with certainty how real the woman with the cut face or the man in the mirror in the photographs of Nikola Vuco taken around 1930 were.

Dusan Matic correctly observed that the representatives of Serbian Surrealism knew something even before they came to Paris, and some of them, notably Vane Bor, brought along with the rest of his luggage from Belgrade a keen interest in film to which he devoted a lot of time in Paris, inter alia, as a contributor to the paper Du Cinéma.139 Later, upon his return from Paris, he continued publishing texts on film in the Belgrade newspapers Danas and Politika and tried his hand at a documentary film about Belgrade. No matter how much the widespread interest in film in avant–garde art circles is emphasized in general, it is nevertheless necessary to lay special emphasis on the marked influence of film not only on Bor’s but also on Ristic’s photographs and photograms, in which they sought to articulate their profound knowledge of moving pictures.

The photogram, in a way, constitutes one of the earliest photographic procedures, and was only with Surrealism again accepted as a specific technique on the margins of the medium. Namely, a photogram is a unique picture which is created, without a camera, by directly lighting an object placed on prepared paper. Already Jaguer observed, in connection with a photogram by Ristic from 1928, that he builds a “quasi cinematographic atmosphere by introducing a quite indistinct female portrait.”140 The female portrait was the image of Seva Ristic. Indeed, he accentuates the properties of a movie picture in the photogram, especially given the fact that it is quite atypical for portraits to feature in the technique of the photogram. 141 The other photograms of Marko Ristic employ the same, “film”, technique of blending images and overlapping scenes, well–known from the practice of silent and avant–garde film. His photograms not only explore the world of objects, which was customary in respect of works of that kind at the time, but, above all, seek to convey the emotivity of the narration to the spectator. Ristic simultaneously composes fragments of portraits (of his beloved wife) taken earlier and objects (souvenirs of love) in order to shape a new, visually complex form. Particularly interesting is how the photograph – portrait easily and softly fits, without visible and abrupt cuts, into the context of the object. Ristic’s photograms constitute early screen–pictures, on the transparent surfaces of which silhouettes of objects are just as transparent as the images of people with their shadows.

Montage juxtaposes figures and objects, a chain with a heart–shaped pendant and lace, for instance, with, as a result, the photogram being perceived as a poetic picture in which an atmosphere of a diary brimming with private memories and souvenirs prevails. Similar elements also feature on some photographs of Marko Ristic, but his series of fifteen photograms constitutes an open structure of a chain of pictures articulating a visual narration typical of film. Photograms are photographs, but linked into a series of pictures, they transcend the static immobility of the photographic still, which already the pioneers of film were well aware of. Naturally, another device in the multiple juxtaposition of objects and figures is also the disrupted optical rhetoric of the collage, which Ristic also uses and which disregards the rules of conventional logic in representing the world. New techniques needed to be devised in order to understand the picture of meta–reality, surreality, as the theoreticians of Serbian Surrealism used to say. One of them was the technique of the photogram, especially valued in the joint experiments of Ristic and Bor. Many avant–garde artists were familiar with the photogram and Christian Schad, Man Ray (rayograph), Laszlo Moholy–Nagy, as well as Vane Bor and Marko Ristic used it a lot. Although the human image appears in photograms, they primarily explore the secret energy, light bonds obtaining between objects. We should also note that Bor’s and Ristic’s photograms build cycles, that is, they are a series of pictures from which, conditionally, a cinematographic structure, so–called trick–film, could be developed.

Vane Bor’s 1928 photograms appeared at the same time and are similar in conceptual terms to the described works of Marko Ristic. What they have in common is primarily exploration of the optical effects of film language, both in photograms and in photographs. It is almost certain that all the known photograms came into being not only at the same time (1928) but also in the same Bor–Ristic workshop in Vrnjacka Banja. But, while Ristic favoured the technique of blended pictures and the transparency of objects, Bor, in addition to all that, engaged in the montage of a number of different frames of the same motif so as to get rid of the static frame of the photograph. Nevertheless, the approaches of both authors concur in the stance that film is primarily an optical and not an epic art. Their research, ultimately, led to establishing processes through which the technique of the photogram would be adapted to the structure of film language and screen–picture. For, the photogram appears on the surface of the paper as on a screen, transmuting relationships between three–dimensional objects into a play of different shadows, penumbras and light.

The unique process in which, like in an ancient theatre of shadows, silhouettes of objects are directly reflected on the surface of the paper, with, understandably, the texture of the material world and the traditional picture with the illusion of space being lost, is a new quality of representation typical of the photogram. But, the photogram not only reduces the representation of the object and ignores perspective in interpreting space, but is wholly devoid of any potential of representing real, or better to put it, any real\spatial relationships. The photogram does not even touch upon the complex problems of perspective and spatial perception of three–dimensional forms, because it is a screen–picture. It is a mechanical process of reproducing objects on the two–dimensional plane of prepared and lighted paper. It can represent only a moment, a short time interval in which the objects found themselves at one time. Objects on paper exposed to light for a brief moment are, hence, deprived of their tactile qualities, recognizable attributes and are reduced to shadows or traces of light. The plane of the photogram, with the aid of light, “is about the forcible negation of any reference to worldly functionalism”.142

Vane Bor, in particular, insisted on the concept of time and screen–picture in his photograms, with the intention of unveiling the relationship between light and shadow, i.e., the hidden reality of marvels. His photograms support Moholy–Nagy’s thesis according to which light and not the camera is essential to the photograph, so, with this in mind, it is easier to understand the common interest of many Surrealists in experimenting with different transparent materials, such as glass, sugar cubes, crystals, veils and similar.143 Bor’s photogram, and not some other fine art work, was published together with, actually on the same page as, the manifesto of the Belgrade Surrealist group in the almanac Nemoguce – L’impossible, as it visually fulfils the requirements of its program. It is there in the service of the visual manifesto of Surrealism, and as an expression of the “pure creation of the spirit” belongs to the type of artistic creation which Breton believed could serve as a means for bringing closer “apparently contradictory dreaming and waking states in a type of absolute reality, surreality.”144

“As everyone knows”, wrote Bor, “Ristic was against automatic painting from the very beginning. He had nothing against mechanical techniques, and thought highly of the frottages of Max Ernst, but had great reservations in respect of painting...”145 Thus, it is not a question of accident, but rather of the intention of the Belgrade Surrealists to express their visual messages through that new mechanical picture – the photogram i.e., photograph. The manifesto of the thirteen Serbian Surrealists was thus published in multimedia form – simultaneously in two different linguistic systems – by word and by photograph, i.e., photogram. We have already spoken about the status of Vuco’s photographs in the almanac The Impossible and, needless to say, Bor’s photograms also had the same standing. They feature either in the form of a manifesto or as the introduction to the almanac and its most important program text, having the status of autonomous works of art.

Vane Bor is one of the most interesting authors who developed an interdisciplinary activity in Surrealist art. He built a film structure in his photograms, but on its account had to abandon the Surrealist principle of automatic thought. In some works, like those with sugar cubes, and we should recall that Marcel Duchamp made interesting tactile and optical illusions with them too, careful observation reveals a process of inscenation and direction, which is by definition opposite to the pure dictation of thought. Nevertheless, in the creation of any photogram or photograph, the principle of mechanical automatism is observed more than in the traditional picture. This fact partly explains why it was precisely these techniques that both the French and the Serbian Surrealists favored. Indeed, Bor and Ristic became familiar with the photogram during their stay among the French Surrealists. Their works disregard the principle of chance and the pure automatism of thought perhaps more frequently than the works of French authors, for the sake of building a screen–picture composition. Pondering the subject, Bor, inter alia, wrote: “I was once asked whether any automatism could exist in the photogram. In a photogram I see too little room for pure mental automatism. But, some can come into being ‘quasi–automatically’, under the limited control of the mind. During the 1930’s I made a few. Instead of deliberately arranging different objects on photographic paper, using a hammer, I smashed a small glass bottle directly on the paper and without touching anything exposed it to light. The result was thus, accidental, and not deliberate.”146 However, since three different photograms with broken pieces of a glass bottle have been preserved, and there could have been more, we must suppose that each photogram was preceded by the breaking of a bottle – if Bor’s memory serves him well – or that, which is the more likely, all the photograms were staged, i.e., the same pieces rearranged anew each time on a new sheet of paper.

In the Surrealist experiment with photograms, Vane Bor, as he signed himself then, assumed the role of director staging a frame so as to make a film from a series of static photographs in which pieces of glass are arranged in different ways. ’A frame, that is consciousness’, says Gilles Deleuze, because ’consciousness is movement, and a frame is also movement, a moving picture.’147 Accordingly, if shaping a composition in a frame is a mental process, so is the organization of movement in the series of Bor’s photograms. The premises of the automatic flow of thought have been abandoned for the purpose of animation, i.e., the development of a cinematographic structure. Instead of strict discipline as required by the first Manifesto of Surrealism, Vane Bor chose other objectives: the process of inscenation organized with the intention to attain a simulation of movement, that is, animated film.

It is commonly known that a photograph, like a painting, freezes movement, but if any situation is photographed at a given speed as a connected series of pictures, it is possible subsequently to represent movement which actually never took place. It was in that very direction that Bor’s experiments unfolded and that is the only reason he took photographs of the same pieces of glass, many times rearranged,. A frame, like an excerpt in time and space, is a concept common to painting, photography and film. The organization of the frame – the composing of a situation in space, on canvas or photographic paper, implies certain mental processes but also elements of the subconscious as has indeed been confirmed by examples of Surrealist film, from Dali and Bunuel to Man Ray. Naturally, when we look at a series of photograms it is not possible to obtain an equally convincing impression of movement nor illusion of time as when the pictures are projected in continuous succession as moving pictures. Nevertheless, even Bor’s partially preserved photograms contain an illusion of time and the magic of movement.

The following excerpt from a film review written in 1935 for Politika shows that he himself was quite familiar with the illusionist potentials of film: ’The movement of dead things was achieved a very long time ago on the (film) screen. Already in 1920, the German director Murnau showed, among others, that trick too, in his film “Nosferatu”. As we know film consists of a series of unmoving photographs which do not depict movement as such, but the individual, very close instances of that movement. Such photographs can be obtained in the case of dead objects too. An object is photographed in its immobility, and is moved between each shot.148 Therefore, Bor’s series of several preserved photograms depicting pieces of a broken glass bottle, as well as other also partially preserved experiments with photographs, show how earnestly he sought to attain a film structure. The cornerstone in work with mechanical pictures was for Bor the idea on the illusion of time and the simulation of movement. In the frozen structure of the photograph and photogram he in fact tested the optical effects of film.

If the assumption that Vane Bor builds a film atmosphere in his photograms is correct, then that same, quasi–cinematographic structure, can be observed in his photographs as well. They were made from 1928 to 1936 and depict diverse motifs ranging from roofs on the French riviera and landscapes with dunes to cemeteries and portraits of his friends. But, regardless of their contents they all present interesting attempts at interpreting movement in the static structure of a photographic image. Once it is a scene of dissipated and blurred light in the frame with roofs, another time the movement is expressed by multiplying the portrait of Vlado Habunek, for instance. In any case, as the extant photographs show, the chosen motif or action are shot consecutively a number of times, like on film tape. The best examples are two photographs: Milica S. Lazovic kao senka (Milica S. Lazovic As a Shadow) and Jedan minut pre zlocina (A Minute Before the Crime) which Vane Bor took in 1935 in an almost identical setting of a rhythmical alternation of light and dark segments – the sky and the tree tops, the wall and the human figure, for instance. The distinctly cinematographic optics, emphasized also by the elevated shooting point, successfully suggests a typical film experience of suspense alluded to by the title itself – A Minute Before the Crime.

Misterija ljudske glave (The Mystery of the Human Head), a collage from the almanac The Impossible, through the multilayered rhetoric of quotations equally hints at danger and anxiety in the photo–portrait of Vlado Habunek. It is a “photo of the head of V. H. at the level of immanent death”, as stated in the caption under the photograph, which, representing a man with his eyes closed and mouth half open, visualizes the stereotype of death. “A picture of the head” was incorporated, with other fragments as well, into a new work – The Mystery of the Human Head. This photo–portrait is, again, just a fragment from the series of portraits of the theater director from Zagreb – Vladimir Habunek – whom Vane Bor photographed in 1929. When all the existing photographs of Habunek are viewed as chained pictures, it is clear that Bor had designed a quasi–cinematographic structure. With the aid of very simple devices (common to photography and film) he created a multilayered work: he rotated the light, changed the position of the head and the expression on the face of the model, chose the cut and the frame, in order to obtain a photographic, static structure akin to moving pictures. Thus, on the basis of the visual experience of silent and Surrealist film, and primarily, through marked dramatic light–dark contrasts in the portraits of Vlado Habunek, Bor caused tension and discomfort in the spectator. Menacing darkness hides almost half of his face, creating tension between the visible and the invisible, the rational and the subconscious sides of the person in the portrait.

When in 1931 he photographed first Vjera Bakotic – Popovic and then Koca Popovic, resorting to strong black and white, i.e., light and dark contrasts, Bor once again interpreted the familiar faces of his friends in the light of mixed feelings and unease.149 His photographic vision gave them the appearance of phantomlike beings, belonging to the world of birds and not humans. Particularly important are the portraits of Vjera Bakotic, although they are only a part of a larger series of consecutive shots, and the one with the hat in the form of a bird’s wings can even be said to synthesize the image of woman in the artistic opus of Vane Bor. Namely, Dejan Sretenovic correctly observed that that very portrait of Vjera Bakotic represented the sublimation of Bor’s preoccupation with the symbol of “the woman–bird”, both in his photography and later painting work.150 With dramatic effect, Bor inserted a deep shadow, as the blade of a knife, on the soft whiteness of a woman’s neck in one of his last extant female portraits – that of Milca Josimovic from 1936, who, like Vjera Bakotic, was photographed at least in two variants, judging by the preserved legacy. The photographs of Vane Bor and Nikola Vuco, and several shots by Marko Ristic, could, therefore, be interpreted in the spirit of Dali’s position at the time according to which “photographic fantasy is much livelier and faster in detecting the dark processes of the subconscious”, and “only the camera, rid of stereotype perceptions and aesthetics in which the human eye has been caught, can grasp the secret reality.”151 Although formally not a member of the Belgrade group of Surrealists, Nikola Vuco, like Vane Bor and Marko Ristic, used purely photographic techniques in shaping a new picture. All three of them build their own language on fragmentary images, and the act of singling out banal phenomena from the context of realistic relationships points to the “irrationality of the concrete”. Adoration and fetishization of unconventional and subjective experiences of people and objects, the development of personal mythologies, to mention just some elements of the well–known practice of the general streams of Surrealism, are articulated in an exciting and stylistically heterogeneous way in the photographic picture. Experiments involving multiplied structures, doubling, reframing, the rotation of figure and light, as well as the visual effects of a picture within a picture and quasi–cinematographic structures, contributed to the new paradigm of the photograph in Serbian Surrealism. It especially valued experimentation and new technical processes, primarily the photogram, already from 1928, just a few years after its debut in Man Ray’s Parisian atelier. And, the drapes and the screens, the lace and the nets, the shadows and the mirrors came in as just a few of the well–known props employed by Surrealism in order to attain perfect visual mimicry in a setting of perplexing photographic surreality in which tension between the known and the unknown, the transparent and the opaque constantly resurges.