Photography and surrealism the equivalent function to what temporal syntax has in linguistic or verbal representations.

In this spatial aspect of the picture, Germaine Berton is more important than other pictures, because her image is literally and symbolically larger.Thus, the image reads like:the group acts as a support for Germaine Berton (we are like a monument for her image), or we support Germaine Berton. This visual support also offers an imaginary identication with Germaine Berton in her look at the spectator of the picture. All these men with their eyes wide open (they see what they are doing), mostly stare out at the viewer along with Berton. They all look at us and this is a paradox of the photograph she is still alive in the picture. Metaphorically the surrealists are alive when they are with her and yet, in her death, they support her in the admirable act of suicide. This is a provocative challenge. At the bottom of the image a motto text takes up a space where another portrait might have been. To C. B., Charles Baudelaire (who, incidentally had loathed the popularity of the photographic portrait),66 is given a voice which by its contiguity with the other portraits seems to speak for all of them with his words: La femme est ltre qui projette la plus grande ombre ou la plus grande lumire dans nos rves. (Woman is the being who projects the greatest shadow or the greatest light in our dreams.) The text acts like a relay for a further distinction between the portraits. Woman (the portrait of Berton) is the greatest shadow/light projected into Man (the depicted men) in our dreams. Reductively, Woman is the ambivalent muse of their dreams; ambivalent because she brings darkness and light. Writing about Baudelaires poetic language, Julia Kristeva notes, The contradictory logic of Baudelaires metaphors foreshadows surrealism and takes root in a fantastic or Baroque tradition 67 Woman offered as the greatest shadow or the greatest light in (their) dreams is the sign in which two attitudes to Woman are condensed. Kristeva points to this ambivalent splitting in Baudelaires poetry towards its amatory objects, poised between ideal (sublime mother) and abject (lowly body) and between image and emptiness.68 We can begin to see here how, at an enigmatic level, the immediate history of Germaine

See Charles Baudelaire, The Modern Public and Photography, reprinted in Classic Essays on Photography, pp. . Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Kristeva also notes that E. T. A. Hoffmanns writing was a favoured reference for Baudelaire, p. .
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