Melancholy Objects Summary and Analysis

Photography has inadvertently led to a Surrealist takeover of modern sensibility. With prose fiction and theater, photography has become a Surrealist art; not an official art, but close to it. The Surrealist movement courts accidents and incongruous juxtaposition; it is capricious and inadvertent. Photography allows all of these goals to conflate into a mimetic art. Surrealism, contrary to its internal philosophy, is not a universal art form—it is class-bound and dated, anecdotal and irrational, and demonstrates more than anything the bourgeois disaffection with the status quo. Like photography, Surrealism seeks to document and reconnoiter society, and examines "important" objects. Photography, like the other Surrealist arts, is itself frozen in time and transitory. Surrealist photography looks at nature, people, and social abjection. Like Surrealism, photography is often about extreme poverty or extreme wealth. In the United States of...