026 · Automatism

11 Aug, 2026

°

Susan Sontag argues in On Photography: ‘Surrealism lies at the heart of the photographic enterprise: in the very creation of a duplicate world’.¹ Elsewhere in the same essay, she writes that ‘what is surreal is the distance imposed, and bridged, by the photograph: the social distance and the distance in time’.²

Sontag’s Surrealism shifts away from André Breton’s psychic model. In the 1924 ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, Breton defines Surrealism: ‘Psychic automatism in its pure state’, and grounds it in a belief in the ‘superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations’.³

The difference is useful.

I want to put Breton back into Sontag.

The camera becomes a technical analogue of psychic automatism. It automates part of representation, loosens intention from result and admits accident. A photograph fixes one moment, then releases it into other times, other contexts, other associations.

Computation accelerates the process. The desire to multiply images grows alongside the technical capacity to produce, alter, store and circulate them. In ‘The Image-World’, Sontag returns to the relation between image and reality and complicates the simple distinction between copy and original.⁴ The photograph remains connected to what stood before the camera, yet the image acquires another existence once it leaves that moment.

Associations accumulate.

Sontag’s ‘duplicate world’ becomes an image-world. Technical processes compress distance and displace time. Breton’s ‘superior reality’ returns here as a possibility: the photograph exceeds the moment it records because it can continually enter new relations.

A cultural compulsion to reproduce the world.

Then reproduce it again.

The photograph leaves the moment that made it.