This is a photo of surrealist artist Salvador Dali, taken by Philippe Halsman in 1948. There are multiple reasons that this is my favorite, the first one being that there is simply so much to look at. From floating furniture, to flying cats, to the wave of water that seems to be suspended in the air, this photograph has so many elements of it that captured Dali’s style of art wonderfully. Halsman had a way of capturing his subject’s true self, hense being the reason he always asked his subjects to jump in their photos. His idea was that the subject will focus more on jumping rather than posing, so that their true self will show more than if they were taking a posed portrait. The second reason I love this photo is because an image like this nowadays would be completely edited to look like this. These days, there probably wouldn’t have been any cats or water anywhere near the area the photo is being taken, but Halsman had all of these things going at the same time. He even had his wife and daughter help with throwing the cats and water. They did take 26 shots, with multiple not looking the way Halsman wanted them to, but ultimately he got what he was looking for. I think it’s interesting to also see other shots that didn’t go to plan, so I’ve added some of those as well. You can see there have been notes written as to what went wrong in each photo. While the end product came out spectacular, it’s eye-opening to see the struggle of it as well.
-Sienna
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