Surrealist photography

• Key high: about 30–45° above eye level, angled down.
• No fill: a black card on the shadow side keeps the shadows dark (negative fill).

Shadow edges

Shadows with crisp outlines, cast by a small or distant light: direct sun, a bare flash, a spotlight.

Shadow depth

Shadows with no fill at all that fall to pure black with no detail, so parts of the subject disappear.

Shape & form

Light turning gradually into shade across faces and objects, so their volume shows.

This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. The set-up at the top of the page is the one we rendered, to scale. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.

Then

40–60 mm · f/8–f/32 · 1/5–5 s · ISO 10–50 on 9 × 12 cm, inferred from the gear and the look. Inferred: glass-plate and sheet-film studio cameras (Man Ray's negatives run from 9 × 12 to about 16 × 21 cm) with normal or longer lenses, stopped down for close-ups under hot lamps, at fractions of a second to seconds; rayographs use no camera at all.

Distance

Within arm’s reach: faces, hands and details fill the frame.

Crop & fill

The edges cut into the subject: heads, limbs or objects run out of frame.

Depth

The scene doubled, layered or split by its reflection in a mirror, a shop window, water or a polished surface.

Many times

Several exposures laid over each other in one frame.

Adult models, often nude, turn their backs, lie with eyes closed as if asleep, or show a face in profile, blank and mask-like; the frame cuts them to a back, a torso, a neck or a hand; faces are doubled or masked, and masks and objects stand in for people.

Turn to the camera

Seen from behind, facing into the scene, so the viewer looks with them.

Head & gaze

Looking down, or eyes shut: inward, modest, asleep or praying.

Without a pose

No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).

The set-up

A scene staged and directed like a film still or a painting. Sets, models and miniatures built to be photographed.

Spare and little styled: a bare adult body, a single object or an animal isolated against black; things out of place (masks, a funnel, tongs, glass tears, lace); now and then costume or shaved, painted or prosthetic make-up for staged self-portraits; street scenes taken as found.

Look of the styling

Few, simple elements on clean surfaces, with space around them.

Monochrome

Rich blacks, clean whites and every grey between. A black-and-white scale pushed towards pure black and pure white, with few middle greys.

Digital & other

Photograms and chemigrams: images made on light-sensitive material without a camera.

Post-production

Several photographs combined into one picture. Marks made by hand on the negative or the print. Tones partly reversed, so some light areas turn dark and shapes gain thin outlines (Mackie lines), made by flashing light on the film or paper during development (the Sabattier effect) or imitated with a curve.

Shown as

Each picture stands on its own.

Shown in

Pictures made for magazine pages and spreads. The book as the main form of the work.

Stay away from objective & scientific, typology, environmental, saturated colour, high-key, flat form, open, filled shadows and smiling.