Photography played an increasingly significant role in surrealism in the 1920s and especially the 1930s, when the art form was becoming ever more popular across printed picture magazines and mass-media newspapers. During this time, the surrealists developed their own avant-garde uses of photography, turning it into both a surrealist art practice in its own right and as a means to represent the surrealist group and their interests. The chapter argues that the surrealists employed a diversity of photographic techniques and genres, and developed these in new ways, as demonstrated across their various activities in public forums, surrealist magazines, exhibitions and books. Since photography was situated clearly within the aims of the surrealist project, surrealist photography becomes both a reflection on and a means of constructing the images of their vision, desire, dreams and social ambitions, which were all too often at variance with the predominant social uses of photography.

Part III deploys the theories and approaches presented in Parts I and II, along with art historical texts, to develop a new interpretational framework for artworks that make rhythm and matter explicit.