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Twelve nights of a dreamer
Manuel Álvarez Bravo
Luis Buñuel
Desiree Dolron
Lee Friedlander
Masahisa Fukase
Kingsley Ifill
Kikuji Kawada
Herbert List
Charles Matton
Giorgio Sommer
Tim Walker
CURATED FROM THE MICHAEL HOPPEN GALLERY COLLECTION, WE PRESENT TWELVE EXCEPTIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS SPANNING THE 19TH CENTURY TO PRESENT DAY. TOGETHER, THEY TRACE THE FRAGILE THRESHOLD OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND EXPLORE THE MYSTERY OF SLEEP.
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I. Photomaton, Luis Buñuel, c. 1929
In 1928 the first photobooth arrived in Paris. Patented by Anatol Josepho in 1925, this automatic machine produced a unique strip of photographs without the intervention of a human operator. No one was more excited than the leader of the Surrealist movement, André Breton, who was first in the queue and brought along his circle of friends to try it out as part of a Dadaesque experiment. This rare Photomaton portrait of Luis Buñuel was made in this context, at the moment when the Surrealists were embracing chance, automation and the strange authority of the machine-made image.The portrait was made around 1929, the year Buñuel released Un Chien Andalou, his landmark collaboration with Salvador Dalí. With his eyes closed inside the automatic booth, Buñuel appears as both sitter and dreamer, an emblem of Surrealism’s turn toward interior vision, accident and the unconscious.
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White Nights
The exhibition title borrows from Robert Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971), adapted from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1848 short story White Nights. Whether in Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg or Bresson’s Paris, the dreamer is a nocturnal wanderer: a young man moving through the city while absorbed in fantasy. In this twilight state, the external architecture of the streets becomes a direct projection of the interior mind. In “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” Susan Sontag writes that for Bresson “psychological analysis is superficial” and that his characters are intended “to be opaque.” This opacity is essential to the dreamer, who is observed from the outside but never fully explained.Presented here are photographs by Kikuji Kawada and Herbert List that extend this nocturnal framework, inhabiting the fluid space between daylight reality and the internal theatre of the artist. List uses blinding Mediterranean light to isolate his sleeper in a state of classical, sunlit reverie, while Kawada relies on deep shadows and heavy contrast to approach the darker undercurrents of the unconscious image. -
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Oblivion
Sleeping next to someone is one of the most intimate things one can do, precisely because it is a shared surrender of control. In David Foster Wallace’s Oblivion (2004), this shared vulnerability becomes almost clinical. A couple can no longer agree on what happens in their own bed, and the question of who is sleeping, who is awake, and who is dreaming has to be taken to a sleep clinic, as if intimacy itself required technical verification. Where White Nights creates intimacy through being awake together, Oblivion finds its opposite in two people losing their bearings side by side; in both scenarios the lovers are bound by a private state no one outside it can fully understand.
This close-up on someone else's love runs through the works of Charles Matton, Masahisa Fukase and Lee Friedlander. Matton’s Lovers removes the body altogether. The pillows become relics of love and intimacy, holding the shape of bodies that have left the room. Fukase’s Yugi is a couple perhaps asleep, perhaps caught in the delirium of night. In Friedlander’s Nude, the woman is not lying in a bed but seated in a chair, her eyes closed before the camera. She may be asleep, or only pretending to sleep, in front of her lover.
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Charles MattonLovers, 1985Titled and dated in pencil verso by the artist's wifeEight vintage gelatin silver prints mounted to boardPaper size: 52.5 x 36.6
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Masahisa Fukase, Yugi, 1968
Fukase estate wetstamp on versoVintage silver gelatin printPaper size 30.8 x 25.7 cm -
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The body (VII. and VIII.)
In Greek mythology, Night, or Nyx, gives birth to Hypnos, sleep, and Thanatos, death. The myth seems to arise from the physical resemblance between the two states, the loss of muscular control during sleep and the outward stillness of the corpse. In the nineteenth century, portraits and photographs of the dead on their deathbeds made this proximity visible, showing bodies apparently asleep, dressed and arranged for memory. There is a long tradition, beginning with the late medieval Dance of Death, of making mortality visible through the staged body. In the twentieth century, Butoh carried this into post-war Japanese dance theatre, using white-painted bodies, extreme slowness, contortion and states of transformation to bring the body close to death. The Greek contemporary choreographer Dimitris Papaioannou gives this language an archaeological form in The Great Tamer, where bodies appear unearthed, fragmented and arranged like remains.Desirée Dolron’s Xteriors VIII constructs this suspended body artificially. Through meticulous digital manipulation, the figure is cooled, smoothed and emptied of ordinary signs of life until she appears less like a sitter than an apparition, bloodless and still. Her process mirrors this choreographic reduction of the body, turning the subject into a calculated, bloodless tableau.Giorgio Sommer’s photograph arrives at the same stillness through historical catastrophe. Made in 1875, it records a plaster cast from Pompeii, formed by pouring plaster into the void left by a body engulfed during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. Sommer’s image belongs to the history of photography at Pompeii, where the cast body became both archaeological evidence and a startling image of death preserved in place. Sommer’s image belongs to the history of photography at Pompeii, where the cast body became both archaeological evidence and a startling image of death preserved in place. -
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Surreal
In her 2010 essay “Failing to Fall,” Siri Hustvedt observes that the English phrase “to fall asleep” is exact because sleep is not an instant break, but a “gradual drop from one state of being into another.” At this threshold, “full waking self-consciousness begins to loosen and unravel.” Surrealism begins from a similar revolt against conscious control, rejecting reason and turning to automatism and dream to make the inner world visible.
This exhibition begins with Buñuel’s 1929 Photomaton, an automatic portrait that links photography to the Surrealist fascination with chance, machinery and closed-eyed interiority. Tim Walker, one of the major figures in contemporary staged fashion photography, expands this dream logic into theatrical scale. His 2006 photograph transforms The Princess and the Pea into a monumental architecture of sleep, with Guinevere van Seenus suspended on twenty mattresses inside a historic English house. Manuel Álvarez Bravo brings the dream image into the context of Mexican modernism and Surrealism. A central figure in twentieth-century Mexican photography, Álvarez Bravo made La buena fama durmiendo in 1938–39 after being commissioned to create an image for the International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico. The sleeping, bandaged nude turns rest into a charged symbolic scene, poised between eroticism, ritual, restraint and dream.
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Tim Walker
Guinevere van Seenus, 20 mattresses and 1 hot water bottle, Fashion: Vivienne Westwood, Glemham Hall, Suffolk, England, 2006Archival pigment printPaper size: 120.9 x 97.8 cmAccompanied by a signed, titled and editioned label from the artist -
“In vain I await / the disintegrations and the symbols that precede sleep.” — Jorge Luis Borges, “Insomnia”
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Manuel Álvarez Bravo
La Buena Fama Durmiendo (Good Reputation Sleeping) , 1939Silver gelatin print, printed 1977Signed in pencil versoPaper size: 27.8 x 35.4 cm -
Library
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Other works from the archives
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Works from this online exhibition are available to view in person at the gallery by appointment. Please email: gallery@michaelhoppengallery.com
