notez

When hands cease to intervene, the mind starts to know the absence of murky digital flowerings; inspiration is extricated from the technical process, which is entrusted solely to the unconscious calculations of the machine.
The new method of spiritual creation which is photography, puts all the stages of the production of the poetic act in their right place.
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Knowing how to look is a completely new system of spiritual surveying. Knowing how to look is a way of inventing. And no invention has been as pure as that created by the anaesthetic stare of the extremely clear eye, free from eyelashes and the Zeiss: distilled and attentive, immune to the rosy flowering of conjunctivitis.
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Photography glides with continual imagination over new events, which in the pictorial realm have only possibilities for being signs. The photographic crystal can caress the cold delicacy of white lavatories; follow the sleepy slowness of aquaria, analyze the most subtle articulations of electrical equipment with the unreal precision of its own magic.
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Photographic imagination! More agile and faster in discoveries than the murky subconscious processes!
A simple change of scale causes unusual similarities, and existing-although undreamt of- analogies.
A clear portrait of an orchid poetically merges with the photographed inside of a tiger's mouth, where the sun plays in a thousand shadows with the physiological architecture of the larynx.
Photography, grasping the most subtle and uncontrollable poetry!
In the big, limpid eye of a cow we can see deformed, in the spherical sense, a miniature, very white post-machinist landscape, precise enough to define a sky where diminutive, luminous little clouds sail by.
New objects, photographed amidst the agile typography of advertisements!
All recently manufactured machines, as fresh as roses, offer their unknown metallic temperatures to the ethereal spring air of photography. Photography, pure creation of the mind!
Salvador Dali, "Photography, Pure Creation of the Mind" 1927


Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery—even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness—is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself.
Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be, and this is enough to remove to some slight degree the terrible injunction; enough, too, to allow me to devote myself to it without fear of making a mistake (as though it were possible to make a bigger mistake). Where does it begin to turn bad, and where does the mind's stability cease? For the mind, is the possibility of erring not rather the contingency of good?
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It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself
increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer—and, in my opinion by far the most important part—has been brought back to light.
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Andre Breton, i can't remember what it's from, dammit.