MAKING NADJA

From 1924 to 1929, Jacques-André Boiffard worked as an assistant to Man Ray in Paris. Eventually, Boiffard wound up taking the photos of street scenes for Andre Breton’s Nadja. 

James Elkins’ fantastic website, Writing With Images, features a close look at the photos and images in Andre Breton’s Nadja. Elkins frames the enigma of Breton’s photos in the context of developing surrealisms: “Because Breton gives inconclusive signs and signals about how he wants images to interact with the narrative, some readers have preferred to read silent mystery in the abandoned streets, and personal narrative in the prose.”

The variations across publications of Nadja shift the role played by images to the periphery. Though I wouldn’t go so far as to call them ornamental, Breton maintains loose relationship to the images. Elkins expands on this:

Toward the end of Nadja, speaking of the book’s composition, [Breton] says he went back “to look at several of the places” he had mentioned in the narrative, in order “to provide a photographic image of them taken at the special angle from which I myself had looked at them.” This is the first a reader hears about the photographs; in the rest of the book the captions tell readers what passage they illustrate, and nothing in the book refers to the illustrations as photographs rather than as direct representations of places. It is also the only time Breton mentions anything to do with the framing of his photographs.

I don’t think it is possible in most cases to guess what the “special angle” might be, and so I doubt the veracity of his comment; it seems more likely that he told Jacques-André Boiffard (the photographer who took the street scenes for Breton) the locations he wanted photographed, but not the angles, or at least not with any precision.

Mixed feelings have been noted by others. According to Rick Poynor, Breton appeared “to have had mixed feelings about the photographs in Nadja, describing the images soon after publication as “dreary and disillusioning,” while nevertheless dedicating a copy to Boiffard with the encomium (perhaps it was faint praise) that his were ‘the most beautiful photographs in this book.’”

Certainly, Breton lacks the tenderness and close attention central to Roland Barthes’ reading of images. The misogyny of Nadja precludes this. Whatever can be said of Breton, it would be silly to call him cerebral; his relationship to thought resisted close study and oriented itself to proximity to social prowess. Unlike Barthes, Breton wanted to be the executive director of an artistic movement. He identified as avant-garde, and fought to secure his reputation against other emerging schools and movements.

In a way, Breton’s use of photos in this novels feels closer to the way Bataille and Leiris explored the arche of the city, providing an archeology of the present by alienating themselves from it. “The only kind of visual material Breton studies is iconographically dense, or full of writing,” Elkins adds, noting that the author “analyzes a few of Nadja’s symbolic drawings,” revels in symbolic density, “reads broadsheets and posters,” yet “barely looks” at the photographs he included.

Breton offers no close reading of photos here. He does, however, offer a stigmata of romantic fantasy that cannibalizes difference.

THE EYES HAVE IT

“I had never seen such eyes. Without a moment’s hesitation, I spoke to this unknown woman.”

Nadja was created in this chance encounter in October 1926, when Breton observed a bedraggled, delicate woman striding towards him on the avenue. She told him she called herself Nadja, “because in Russian it’s the beginning of the word hope, and because it’s only the beginning.”

The two met repeatedly for several days, and their encounters were marked by uncanny coincidences and inexplicable events. True to form, Breton got bored with Nadja’s erratic behavior and pulled away, waiting until the end of the novel to reveal that he had been warned “Nadja was mad” months ago.

After causing a disturbance in the corridors of her hotel, she was taken to an infirmary.

Breton changed several photographs for the 1963 edition, adding at least three new photographs including the montage of Nadja’s eyes (pictured above). See also “her eyes of fern”; “products of a ‘voluntary banality’”; alleged anticipations of choragraphy.

According to Elkins, Breton’s “narrative isn’t indifferent to details such as particular turns of phrase, nuances of expression, and the verbal compositions of the vignettes involving Nadja; but the street photographs are.” Elkins continues:

This quality of “aesthetic indifference” doesn’t pertain to the photographs of documents or drawings (they are full of legible and meaningful details, and some have carefully chosen compositions or interesting assemblages of objects); and it doesn’t apply to the portraits (which are carefully done according to various portrait conventions of the time). The indifference applies mainly to the street photographs. Can we distinguish between Breton’s intentions and capacities as a photographer and our proclivity to read the photographs as aesthetically indifferent? I wonder this especially in light of his own reference to the photographs as capturing the “special angle” from which he experienced each place.

BOIFFARD V. BRETON

When Boiffard pissed off the kingpin, Breton expelled him the Surrealist group.

He went on to contribute to Un Cadavre, a pamphlet that in no uncertain terms castigated Breton and his leadership of the movement before allying himself with the renegade Surrealists grouped around Georges Bataille. Some of his most fantastic work appeared when Boiffard served as the in-house photographer for Bataille’s Documents. His photographs illustrating Bataille’s article “Big Toe” are freakish and disturbing, as intended.