Monday 10 March 2014

Compare and Contrast Brassai and Man Ray


The two images I have chosen are the Man Ray ‘Untitled’ and Brassai ‘Nude’.
Choosing these I have chosen to discuss the way these images may appear to look like object of the body, making them seem surreal. “For Bataille informe is the category that allow all categories to be un-thought’ this quote from page 39 of the reading is possibly trying to say that what you see my show something that is usually un-thought of in an image. The photo by Brassai ‘nude’ shows the back and buttocks of a young woman, but what is it that we also see?

‘Conceptual implications of informe: for this term is meant to allow one to think the removal of all those boundaries by which concepts organize reality’, this quote explains the removal of boundaries, “thought of the unknown” In which when we look at an image of a hat or a woman’s body we can remove the ‘boundaries’ and see another image in which is a concept of reality.

Brassai and Man Ray’s image are both of normal things, however looking closer we can see other forms of the body emerge. In Brassai I see a male penis, the buttocks the testicles and the woman’s curved back the rest. However in Man Ray’s we see a woman’s vagina outline, this of its unique shaping of the hat, “to undo formal categories, to deny that each thing has its ‘proper’ form”.

By choosing to remove a formal look on an image we see the unseen images that are placed silently into the photographs, seeing a penis and a vagina are what was known as the unknown area, a ‘Vagina Dentata’ as it was believed that women’s vagina’s held teeth with in them, this being an old folks tale “with the associated implication that sexual intercourse might result in injury or castration for the man involved.”


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