Great Smoky Mountains, Tennessee, May 2023
I may have mentioned that I am fascinated by surrealism, by the artists like Dali on the one extreme and the photographers like Lee Miller on the other. One of the definitions I found for surrealism is the aim "to revolutionize human experience. It balances a rational vision of life with one that asserts the power of the unconscious and dreams. The movement's artists find magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional." (see tate.org.uk) This photo speaks to me of surrealism just as Lee Miller's photo "Portrait of Space" taken near Siwa, Egypt in 1937. It stops my gaze and makes me wonder did I find this in the real world, or did I dream it; is that my unconscious coming forward out of the picture. Alfred Stieglitz said "In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality."