Five Takeaways from Jim Jarmusch’s Conversation at Paris Photo

The echoes of surrealism reverberate throughout filmmaker and artist Jim Jarmusch’s oeuvre, 100 years on from the publication of André Breton’s surrealist manifesto. The centenary of the text led to a surge of surrealist exhibitions all over Paris this year, an undercurrent that traveled through Paris Photo last weekend. The fair’s invité d’honneur, Jarmusch discussed his selection of 34 surrealist photos during a highly anticipated conversation on Friday night with writer Philippe Azoury. Jarmusch’s curation includes the masters of surrealism, Man Ray and Dora Maar, as well as contemporary photographers like Michael Ackerman and FLORE, reflecting that perhaps the surrealist movement never came to an end. 

Talking about the enduring influence of surrealism on artistic expression, Jarmusch stated that: “The surrealist way of finding a new way of thinking… of juxtaposing things that are dreamlike and things that are rational, not prioritizing one over the other… It’s still very inspiring to me.” One could say that calling contemporary artworks surrealist is synonymous with calling them unoriginal. However Jarmusch would prefer to quote John Lennon, saying, “One’s originality comes from the inability to emulate your influences.”

Jarmusch became enamored with surrealism during a study abroad year in Paris.

The influence of surrealism is hard to miss in the filmmaker’s ethereal world-building. Films like Stranger than Paradise and Only Lovers Left Alive are odes to surrealist absurdism, often juxtaposing the mundane and the fantastical. Introduced to the movement as a young teenager via the collages of Max Ernst, Jarmusch’s relationship with surrealism was cemented in the birthplace of the movement itself. Jarmusch told guests that during a study abroad year in Paris in 1974, he read Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon and Nadja by Breton, using the texts as meandering maps to the city. “Some of the glass arcades were still intact,” said Jarmusch. “The passages, incredibly hauntingly beautiful and strange, were already archaic ghosts.”

From the Rue des Ursulines where Jarmusch lived, and where Salvador Dali and Luis Brunel showed the premier of Un chien andalou in 1928, the future filmmaker honed his appreciation of silent films of the late 1920s. This later inspired him to to score the restored surrealist films of Man Ray with his band SQÜRL, the première of which was shown at this year’s Paris Photo.

For Jarmusch, the surrealists embraced contradiction.

Jarmusch reflected on how his selection embodies his idea of a surrealism that elevates the scientific and the dreamlike, placing worlds that are often at odds with each other on the same plane. Lacock woodyard through lattice window, a 1839 camera-less photograph by William Henry Fox Talbot, is anterior to the movement, but for Jarmusch the image is “utterly surrealist.” Elaborating, he explained that the photo is remarkable in that, through the use of a unique chemical process, the image presents “an odd juxtaposition of two things: something realistic but presented in an abstract way, so it is surrealism.” 

Comparing the image with FLORE’s 2023 Untitled from the series Les Jardins de Josef, made close to 200 years later, Jarmusch said the image similarly presents a “merging of (the) technical and dreamlike.” For Jarmusch, photography is, afterall, a chemical process that involves “lights hitting silver alloys on film…that builds something from a dream.”

Art should show sex as it really is.

Of the 34 photographs Jarmusch selected, about a third are nudes. Azoury asked Jarmusch why he chose so many images that could be considered erotic, when his own films often shy away from depicting sex. Jarmusch responded that he steers away from sex scenes because he laments how cinema often depicts sex as reductive. He selected works by Saul Leiter, Xiu Liang, and Lisette Carmi to show the reciprocal joy of sexual celebration – which is in line with the surrealist approach to pulsion, eroticism and identity from artists like Meret Oppenheim and Claude Cahun. If Jarmusch was to make a film about sex, he said it would be about two young lovers who show sex as it really is: “beautiful, neurotic, funny, stupid, not successful, not satisfying, satisfying, ridiculous, ethereal, ecstatic… all the things sex can be, and not reductive in the way that I find objectionable in cinema.”

Kenshichi Heskiki’s Unitled (1975) shows an eroticism that is perhaps more overt than the intimacy of Saul Leiter, but for Jarmusch, the photograph “seems very minimal, strikingly dreamlike and semi erotic in a funny way.” The artist picked up on how the texture of the walls and the subject’s skin contrasts with her hair being a non-textural “block into blackness,” and thus of a striking beauty. The image appears to be taken in a hotel room, thereby likely depicting a sex worker, however the seemingly playful and relaxed nature of the subject leaves all open to interpretation. In comparison to other countries’ rich view of sex in all its forms, “America is so repressed sexually,” said Jarmusch. “We just use it to sell things, not to celebrate its beauty.”

This element of celebration is something that Jarmusch considers pivotal to understanding Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s work. Defending Araki against those who claim that the photographer is exploitative, Jarmusch said: “To me, Araki instead is celebrational of sex and his love of women particularly.” Furthering his defense while commenting on the bondage present in two of the images he selected, Jarmusch noted that the tradition “is not repression; it’s one form of sexual expression that is consensual and historical, culturally, and Araki is definitely a celebrationist… There is a reciprocal joy in the sexual nature of his photographs.”

The surrealists were more inclusive than some art historians would have you believe. 

Jarmusch’s selection provided ample opportunity to explore surrealism’s complicated relationship with women. While some today still perceive surrealism to be a male-dominated affair that actively excluded women, Jarmusch quipped the contrary. Commenting on his selection of a photo by Dora Maar, and reminding audiences that it was Lee Miller rather than Man Ray who pioneered solarisation in photography, Jarmusch painted the movement as largely inclusive. Rather, it was the art historians of the 20th century who neglected to include those women who actively participated in what can be considered as one of the most female-and queer-friendly movements of the period.

This extends to themes of sexual diversity and identity, which Jarmusch addressed when commenting on his choice of August Sander’s Sekretärin beim Westdeutschen Rundfunk Köln (1931). He drew a connection between the image and Italian photographer Lisetta Carmi’s moving photographs of marginalized communities, published in her 1972 book The Cross-Dressers. “I love diversity in nature and in all things,” said Jarmusch. “I don’t understand the objection to sexual diversity and representation. I’m sick of trans people being victimized, and any queer people being victimized… the beauty of all things and natural phenomena is diversity.” To a resounding applause, Jarmusch concluded, saying: “I’ve had enough of it. So, really, protect trans people now more than ever. We must protect people’s rights to be who they are.”

Make art with just one person in mind.

Nonchalant, well-spoken, and funny as ever, Jarmusch closed the talk by responding to a question from an audience member about whether artists should create with the world in mind. Referencing Frank O’Hara, the New York school poet whom Jarmusch considers an artistic godfather, Jarmusch implored artists to revisit O’Hara’s 1959 manifesto “Personism.” Instead of trying to make art for everyone, O’Hara implored readers to “put the poem squarely between the poet and the person.” Jarmusch added, “speak to one person. As though you’re giving [your art] to your lover. Don’t think anything beyond that, that’s my approach.”

Jarmusch’s selection of 34 images attests to the truly unprecedented contribution surrealists made to art-making, and to the depth of Jarmusch’s own taste, art historical knowledge and multidisciplinary art practice. Photography’s unique ability to “suck a poem out of the air” – as Jarmusch aptly quoted from Jack Kerouac’s preface to Robert Frank’s The Americans – is at odds with film’s years-long slog towards completion. However, with another film currently in the works, Jarmusch maintains that making movies is the best of all worlds: the perfect combination of art, music, writing and photography.