Rachel Baran’s Surrealist Lens Manipulates The Body

A young photographer named Rachel Baran is taking surrealist pictures to a new level. Mostly self portraits in strange settings, her manipulation in photoshop allows fantastical things to happen. Displaying nuances usually found only in painting, it’s no wonder people are taking notice. According to her Facebook page, she lives in Ohio, just graduated from college and seems like a regular gal except for her highly creative eye. Some significant work shows appendages (fingers) in different stages of duress. In one, two hands are fused together by skinwebs and another shows a cutoff finger revealing not blood but concrete. One does reveal blood and a montage of her cutup portrait on a clothes line to dry turns a bit, well, emotional. Whether there is any real logic to her work is another question. However, an understanding might not matter, because the pictures hold your attention. Some may dismiss them as pretentious gobbledygook, others will embrace and try to find hidden meaning. The surrealists played with subconscious. Ideas were thought about but not necessarily thought out. Comprehension was a feeling. Dali believed in Jungian and Freudian behavior. For part of his daily practice, the artist would fall asleep with a big sketchbook on his lap and be awoken by it crashing onto the floor and immediately jot down whatever was in his mind. Baran’s photographs follow a similar plan. They exist to explore a subconscious path. Through a series of latent acts, interesting moments occur and the camera is there to capture them. (via Artfucksme)