Agui Ubac

Soon after Raoul Ubac moved to Paris in 1930, he met members of the Surrealist group and became interested in photography. Ubac darkened, lightened, montaged, or otherwise intervened in printing his experimental photographs, making dreamlike images that went against photography as a straight record of (waking) reality. The features of Ubac’s future wife, Agui, who also modeled for a number of his most famous photographic images (all titled Penthesilea, for the queen of the Amazons) appear here, exceptionally, to be unmanipulated. This “naturalness” is essential to the impression of an authentic inner state: either sleep or pleasure, or both at once.