This is not a fish – how Rene Magritte inspired my photography

There are various motivations for taking a photo–to capture a moment, to document a place or thing, to record beautiful light, or to fulfill an assignment. One of my interests in photography has been to somehow challenge the viewer so that they do a double take; the image holds their attention because there is something thought provoking about it. The notion of using visual trickery and humour came to me early on after discovering the work of American photographer Lee Friedlander, and also the paintings of Belgian surrealist painter Rene Magritte.

It was in Paris in 1978 that I first saw Magritte’s dream-like, illusionistic images. I could gaze at them for a long time and really never figure them out. But that really didn’t matter, for it was the feeling that they invoked that was special–that little area of my brain, the “Magritte zone,” had been suddenly stimulated. Over time I began using these perceptual tricks in my own photography.

One of Magritte’s most famous works is “The treachery of images” (1929), a painting that challenges the viewer’s notion of art. An image of a pipe has the words “This is not a pipe.” written below it. When Magritte was once asked about this image, he replied that of course it was not a pipe, just try to fill it with tobacco. Andrea K. Scott writes in the New Yorker, “It may be art’s most famous one-liner, but it’s a startlingly modernist proposition: this isn’t a pipe, it’s a picture. Magritte’s enduring popularity has edged his once shocking imagery into the realm of cliché. But his radical use of language and his transposition of the banal and the unnerving set a precedent. Would the enigmas of Jasper Johns’s flags or Ed Ruscha’s deadpan pairing of image and text have been conceivable otherwise? Magritte, who dressed like a banker and was known to paint at his dining-room table, saw himself as a “secret agent” in the war on bourgeois values. He once said of his mission, ‘Too often by a twist of thought, we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange’.’’

In my Wish You Were Here series, I aim to challenge the viewers’ attention by in a subtle way by finding everyday scenes with elements of surrealism. Like Magritte, I want to make the familiar seem a little strange, but without Photoshop and image manipulation. These photos come about through observation, using juxtaposition, reflection, typography, and scale. My new project, “Wish You Were Here – Monochrome Dreaming” shows black and white images that aspire to challenge and entertain the senses. Is that really a fish, or just a fishy picture?

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of visiting the Magritte Museum in Brussels, Belgium, and found that I was still deeply inspired (and entertained) by his whimsical, dream-like images. I realized that I had never really left the Magritte Zone.

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