• Twelve nights of a dreamer

    Luis Buñuel

    Desiree Dolron

    Lee Friedlander

    Masahisa Fukase

    Kingsley Ifill

    Kikuji Kawada

    Herbert List

    Charles Matton

    Giorgio Sommer

    Tim Walker

    Kansuke Yamamoto

     

    Twelve photographs from the archive of Michael Hoppen Gallery, ranging from early twentieth-century prints to contemporary works, trace the fragile threshold of consciousness and explore the mystery of sleep.

     
  • I. Photomaton, Luis Buñuel, c. 1929 In 1928 the first Photomaton arrived in Paris. Patented by Anatol Josepho in 1925,...

    I. Photomaton, Luis Buñuel, c. 1929

    In 1928 the first Photomaton arrived in Paris. Patented by Anatol Josepho in 1925, the automatic machine produced a unique strip of photographs without the intervention of a human operator. The device quickly became a fascination for the Surrealists, who embraced chance, automation and new forms of image-making. This rare Photomaton portrait of Luis Buñuel was made during the period in which he was closely associated with the Surrealist movement and coincides with the release of Un Chien Andalou (1929), his landmark collaboration with Salvador Dalí. Produced on one of the first Photomaton machines installed on Boulevard Haussmann, the work belongs to an important moment in the history of both photography and the Parisian avant-garde.
     
    This image captures Luis Buñuel as the absolute emblem of the surreal and the imaginative. With his eyes closed tightly inside the machine, Buñuel retreats entirely into his own subconscious, leaving us to wonder exactly what he sees behind the closed eyes. 
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  • White Nights

    The exhibition title borrows from the 1971 film by Robert Bresson, which adapted the 1848 short story White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky set his narrative during the brief summer nights of Saint Petersburg when darkness never fully arrives, while Bresson updated the setting to Paris, transforming the central character into a young painter drifting through a dreamlike daze.

     

    We are presenting here photographs by Kikuji Kawada and Herbert List that extend that nocturnal framework, inhabiting the fluid, evocative space between daylight reality and the internal theater of the artist. This precise state of suspended consciousness links the two creators. While List utilizes blinding daylight to isolate his sleeper in a state of classical, sunlit daytime reverie, Kawada relies on deep shadows and heavy contrast to explore the darker, chaotic undercurrents of the unconscious mind, uniting both photographers in a shared study of the creative mind moving between waking life and pure hallucination
  • II. Kikuji Kawada, From the series Los Caprichos, Invisible, 1980

    II. Kikuji Kawada

    From the series Los Caprichos, Invisible, 1980

    Born in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1933, Kikuji Kawada rose to prominence on the strength of his poetic, symbolically charged photography. This diverse and prolific body of work may be seen as articulating Kawada's evolving appraisal of Japanese national identity, and its historical trajectory in the turbulent post-war period. .

     

    His Los Caprichos series takes its title from Francisco de Goya's late eighteenth-century prints, which, at once satirical and unsettling, exposed superstition, social hypocrisy and the darker impulses underlying Enlightenment society. Kawada first used the title Los Caprichos for photographs published in Camera Mainichi in 1972, later extending the series across magazines, exhibitions and publications. Rather than illustrating Goya directly, Kawada draws on the spirit of the original series, using the title as a framework through which everyday scenes take on a quiet ambiguity and historical tension.

     

     
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  • III. Herbert List, Laurel over the Eyes, Athens, Greece, 1937

    III. Herbert List

    Laurel over the Eyes, Athens, Greece, 1937

    During the 1930s Herbert List travelled extensively throughout Greece, producing photographs that reflected his enduring interest in classical antiquity and Mediterranean culture. Made in Athens in 1937, Laurel over the Eyes belongs to a body of work that combined the formal precision of modernist photography with references to ancient sculpture and mythology. The photograph was produced shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War and remains one of the most recognisable images from List's early career.

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  • Oblivion

    In David Foster Wallace’s short story “Oblivion,” a couple’s nights are disrupted by the husband’s persistent insomnia and the wife’s increasingly erratic behaviour during the night. Wallace tracks the agonizing descent into sleep as a featherfall in which lines of thought begin to become surreal around the edges, a fragile state where the intimate sanctuary of the marital bed transforms into a site of profound psychological estrangement.
     
    This complex association of sleeping next to someone, where profound connection collides with a terrifying loss of mental control, is beautifully mapped through the contrasting works of Charles Matton and Masahisa Fukase. Matton explores the quiet domestic residue of intimacy through his study of crumpled, shifting pillows, capturing the physical memory of two bodies sharing a bed and the silent spaces left behind after a night of rest. In stark contrast, Fukase reveals the chaotic, wild edge of this shared unconsciousness. His raw, high contrast photograph captures a couple thrown together in what feels like a drunken delirium, where pale, tangled limbs slice through the heavy shadows of the room. Together, these images expose the ultimate vulnerability of lovers asleep in the dark, moving between the gentle solace of a shared bed and the uninhibited, surreal theatre of a restless mind.
  • IV. Charles Matton
    Charles Matton
    Lovers, 1985
    Titled and dated in pencil verso by the artist's wife
    Eight vintage gelatin silver prints mounted to board
    Paper size: 52.5 x 36.6

    IV. Charles Matton

    Charles Matton (b. Paris, France, 1931; d. Paris, France, 2008) was a multidisciplinary artist working as a painter, sculptor, designer, writer, photographer, filmmaker and screenwriter. A well known and active presence in postwar Paris, he occupied a central place within the city’s artistic and intellectual circles.

     

    Photography entered Matton’s practice in 1962, when he discovered the photostat process, whilst working as a press illustrator. He went on to produce a significant amount of photostats, many of which he later destroyed. The process translated images into stark contrasting prints, reducing detail, simplifying tonal values and altering the light of the original photograph. Colour images, once treated in this way, acquired a sharper and more direct quality, while scale, grain and exposure significantly shaped the final result. The photostat became an integral and sustained element of his photographic work.

     
  • V. Masahisa Fukase

    V. Masahisa Fukase

    Masahisa Fukase created an intensely introspective practice that transformed post war Japanese photography into a tool for raw self expression. His seminal 1971 debut photobook Yugi or Homo Ludens serves as a powerful psychological mirror, weaving together six distinct series that subvert traditional documentary photography into an intimate theater of the self. Through gritty and high contrast imagery, ranging from the unsettling juxtapositions of his wife Yoko in a slaughterhouse to candid and theatrical glimpses of their volatile marriage, Fukase explores the blurred boundaries between love, destruction, and mortality. This groundbreaking early body of work frames life’s rituals not as static records, but as dark, absurd, and deeply felt games played against the inevitability of death, capturing the raw emotion and brilliant contradictions that define his enduring legacy.
     
  • Masahisa Fukase, Yugi, 1968

    Masahisa Fukase, Yugi, 1968

    Fukase estate wetstamp on verso
    Vintage silver gelatin print
    Paper size 30.8 x 25.7 cm
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  • VI. Lee Friedlander

    VI. Lee Friedlander

    Lee Friedlander began photographing the American social landscape in 1948. Over the course of a career spanning more than six decades, he has turned his attention to an extraordinary range of subjects, from city streets and monuments to trees, automobiles and nudes. While Henri Cartier-Bresson's notion of the "decisive moment" has long shaped the history of photography, Friedlander's work has instead been described as one of "decisive framing", using layered compositions and multiple perspectives to organise an extraordinary amount of visual information within a single image.
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  • Theatre

    But just as sleep ushers in dreams, it invites nightmares as well. With the unconscious state comes a loosening of reason, giving way to visions of sleepwalking, delirium, and even madness. In Desirée Dolron’s Xteriors, the stillness of the figure recalls the controlled silence of painted portraiture, while Giorgio Sommer’s photograph of a victim of Pompeii brings the association between sleep and death into historical focus. Together, the works mark two very different edges of the same condition: one imagined, constructed and theatrical; the other archaeological, factual and final.
  • Desiree Dolron, Xteriors VIII, 2004 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Desiree Dolron
    Xteriors VIII, 2004
    Signed and editioned by artist verso
    Colour coupler print on Endura Paper
    Paper size: 174.5 x 115 cm
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  • Giorgio Sommer, Sleeping man killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii. 1875 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Giorgio Sommer, Sleeping couple, killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii.1875 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Giorgio Sommer, Cast of sleeping man killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii. 1875 (Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
    Giorgio Sommer
    Sleeping man killed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii. 1875
    artists blind stamp on lower left hand corner
    Paper Size: 24 x 18.3 cm
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  • The Bleeding image

    The Bleeding image

    During deep sleep, the sharp boundaries of our conscious reality begin to dissolve, causing memories, thoughts, and images to bleed into one another. This category brings together the oldest and the newest works in the selection to map that fluid, fading texture of the mind. The trajectory opens with a warm toned salt print by an Unknown Photographer from circa 1900, capturing a nude on a bed in a state of absolute immobility. Over the last century, the natural fading and chemical deterioration of this antique surface have softened the outlines of the figure, causing the physical image of the body to slowly melt into the paper.
     
    This physical erosion finds a striking contemporary echo in the newest work in the show, a 2026 print by Kingsley Ifill. Ifill captured the heavy texture of exhaustion through a literal darkroom accident, developing the photographic paper completely upside down. By processing the paper from the reverse side, the chemistry forced the image to transpose and bleed faintly through the rough, fibrous back of the material. This technical mistake links the two prints through their grainy, bleeding surfaces. The heavily textured, blurred result creates a perfect material metaphor for the sleeping mind, where the clear structures of the waking world are turned upside down and reduced to a distant, ghostlike artifact
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  • Surreal

    When the waking mind surrenders to sleep, the rational filters of daily life collapse, giving way to an unfiltered, automatic state of being. Following the psychoanalytic frameworks of Carl Jung, this internal shift turns the resting body into a portal for a rich, symbolic language where universal archetypes bypass logical thought. This transition turns the unconscious mind into a canvas for radical surrealist experimentation, where the camera mimics and inflates the very mechanics of dreaming. We are presenting here photographs by Luis Buñuel, Kansuke Yamamoto, and Tim Walker that trace a century of this surrealist dreamscape, shifting from early mechanical snapshots to monumental, symbolic staging.
     
    The section opens with the unique 1929 photomaton by filmmaker Luis Buñuel, capturing rapid, automated snapshots from the very first photo booth in Paris. These unposed portraits mimic the flashing, erratic logic of a brain entering early sleep, capturing the raw face of the subconscious. This mechanical beginning transitions into Kansuke Yamamoto’s avant garde 1938 composition. Yamamoto uses masterful surrealist framing to transform ordinary rest into an unsettling, abstract landscape of the mind, dissolving the boundary between objective reality and pure hallucination. The narrative concludes with Tim Walker's modern fashion surrealism from 2006. Walker expands this internal world into a grand, physical spectacle, staging an elaborate, oversized vision of a model suspended atop twenty stacked mattresses inside a historic estate. Together, these three creators show how the sleeping form can be warped and reconfigured, turning the dark hours of the night into the ultimate theater of the absurd.
  • Tim Walker, Guinevere van Seenus, 20 mattresses and 1 hot water bottle, Fashion: Vivienne Westwood, Glemham Hall, Suffolk, England, 2006

    Tim Walker

    Guinevere van Seenus, 20 mattresses and 1 hot water bottle, Fashion: Vivienne Westwood, Glemham Hall, Suffolk, England, 2006
    Archival pigment print
    Paper size: 120.9 x 97.8 cm
    Accompanied by a signed, titled and editioned label from the artist
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  • Kansuke Yamamoto, Untitled, 1938

    Kansuke Yamamoto

    Untitled, 1938
    Artist estate stamp, signed, titled and dated by Toshio Yamamoto verso
    Vintage silver gelatin print
    Paper size: 15.2 x 23.2 cm
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  • Miroslav Tichý, Untitled

    Miroslav Tichý

    Untitled
    Unique silver gelatin print
    Paper Size: 18 x 13 cm