Within surrealist practice, too, woman was in construction, for she is the obsessional object there as well. And since the vehicle through which she is figured is itself manifestly constructed, woman and photograph become figures for each other’s condition: ambivalent, blurred, indistinct, and lacking in, to use Edward Weston’s word, “authority.” 

 One photo out of focus is a mistake. Ten photos out of focus are an experimentation. One hundred photos out of focus are a style. 

 It looked like a snowstorm, with the flakes flying in all directions instead of falling, then suddenly becoming a field of daisies as if the snow had crystallized into flowers. This was followed by another sequence of huge white pins crisscrossing and revolving in an epileptic dance, then again by a lone thumbtack making desperate efforts to leave the screen. There was some grumbling in the audience, punctuated by a whistle or two. Then the film broke, not once, but twice. A cry for the lights arose, the theater lit up disclosing a group locked in a struggle preventing the participants from striking any blows. Small groups in other parts of the theater were seen, divided into two camps, engaged in similar activities. A group of police stationed outside in anticipation of trouble rushed in and succeeded in emptying the theater. (On the first showing of Rayograph film "Return to Reason") 

 Surrealist photography does not admit of the natural, as opposed to the cultural or made. And so all of what it looks at is seen as if already, and always, constructed, through a strange transposition of this thing into a different register. We see the object by means of an act of displacement, defined through a gesture of substitution.