DAY 308

PHOTOGRAPHIC CURIOSITIES

Surreal Dreamscapes

PLUMBING THE DEPTHS OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS

“Listening to Irene, I lapsed into reverie. This dream of hers was pure gold, intellectual ambrosia—a gift from the gods.”—Irvin D. Yalom, M.D.¹

Sigmund Freud once personified the human subconscious as an anthropomorphic “dream-weaver” who sat in a person’s mind spinning yarns as they slept, enshrouding profound messages within an enigmatic tapestry of images and symbols.

While the abstractions and dark mysteries of the dream world have influenced art since time immemorial, they have been given new life in the medium of surreal photography, as images are melded and distorted into visual depictions of the immaterial.

The late Francesca Woodman became famous for her haunting black and white photographs that often betrayed profound emotional angst in the form of female figures with obscured faces. Duane Michals examines the ever-present issues of death, human relationships, and grief with his compositions.

San Francisco photographer Rachyel Puleo draws heavily on images from her own dreams for inspiration. She describes the dream which inspired the ethereal piece, Neither Here Nor There (above): “I was talking to the people around me, but they couldn’t see or hear me. It was like I was invisible, or dead...but I didn’t know it.” Her work Feet on the Ground (below), on the other hand, is a challenge to “examine your inner self—even the darker side of it.” —DJS