Scanning Task

Surrealism developed from a modernist art movement called Dada.Dada or Dadaism is a cultural movement that began in Switzerland during World War 1 and peaked from 1916 to 1920.Dada soon became an international movement that influenced later styles such as Pop Art.

The Dada movement primarily involved visual arts, literature, theatre and graphic design. The work of Dada artists can be described as deliberate irrationality,disillusionment,chance, randomness and absurd. This is due to Dada being said to be “anti-art”. For everything that art stood for, Dada was to represent the opposite. For example, if art were to have at least a implicit or latent message, Dada strove to have no meaning…..INTERPRETATION OF DADA IS DEPENDENT ENIRELY ON THE VIEWER.


Surreal pictures are based on thought, -on subconscious mind and vision rather than a reason. Much like a dream…. We often dream of familiar things, but all mixed up in strange ways that we are not used to. Photography was an ideal medium to convey this idea, and the growing existence of so many photographs in print encouraged new techniques of surrealist art….
For example Photomontage which was popular amongst Berlin Dadaists. This technique involved constructing pictures from photographs from newspapers and magazines in order to create pieces which could be interpreted in many different ways…

Photomontages effect on people depends on knowing it is a photograph and accepting it as truthful , yet realizing the situation it shows is impossible.

The work is often an expression of a point of view, a dream like fantasy or a piece of visual humor.

These days of course, Photoshop allows us to create the impossible using multiple photographs and graphics.