Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

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Many artists in the 1960s presented everyday American life as being off kilter, uncanny, or unexpected—in other words, surreal. This was particularly true of photographers, who increasingly found that if they looked at the world from a certain angle the disorientation of modern life became evident. The artist and filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek even suggested “the Social Surreal” as the title for a 1967 Museum of Modern Art exhibition, ultimately called New Documents, of young photographers who took this new documentary approach.

Images and videos capturing the strangeness of postwar American life became even more ubiquitous as television sets transmitted this novel visual language directly into American homes. Artists such as Lee Friedlander, Paul Thek, and Luis Jimenez were unnerved by television’s presence—the oddity of bringing this technology into a domestic space, an object that might confront you with images of Count Dracula one moment and the Vietnam War the next.

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Person wearing a white mask creates a giant bubble while a child reaches out and a cyclist passes by.

Shawn Walker's documentary-style photographs encapsulate a sense of latent strangeness in otherwise ordinary circumstances. As a founding member of the activist filmmaking collective Newsreel (founded 1967), Walker spent the 1960s focused on the cultural, social, and political change happening in the world and, importantly, right around him in Harlem. Along with the work of Ming Smith and Adger Cowans, his photographs also foreground the artists of the Kamoinge Workshop (founded 1963)—a collective of Black artists who primarily photographed Black communities—during a period in which their work was largely excluded from institutional exhibitions and conversations.

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Sixties Surreal | Art & Artists

Social Surreal

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Shawn Walker, Man with Bubble, Central Park (Near Bandshell), c. 1960–79 (printed 1989)

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