The Story Behind the Making of the Iconic Surrealist Photograph, Dalí Atomicus (1948)

Together with his cane, his well-known waxed mus­tache, and his behavior of tak­ing unusu­al ani­mals for walks, Sal­vador Dalí would seem to have cul­ti­vat­ed his personal pho­tographa­bil­i­ty. However tak­ing a pic­ture of the person who stood as a liv­ing def­i­n­i­tion of pop­u­lar sur­re­al­ism was­n’t a job to be approached casu­al­ly — espe­cial­ly not for Philippe Hals­man, who did it greater than any­one else. Orig­i­nal­ly from what’s now Latvia, he led a tur­bu­lent life that even­tu­al­ly (after a cou­ple of inter­ven­tions by none oth­er than Albert Ein­stein, of whom Hals­man lat­er made a well-known por­trait) introduced him to the Unit­ed States. It was in New York, in 1941, that he met Dalí, hav­ing been assigned to pho­to­graph considered one of his exhi­bi­tions within the metropolis.

Hals­man had extra oppor­tu­ni­ties to pho­to­graph Dalí, and these jobs became a long time of col­lab­o­ra­tion. Its many fruits embrace a guide con­tain­ing 36 views of the artist’s mus­tache alone, but additionally the extra ambi­tious — and rather more sur­re­al — picture Dalí Atom­i­cus, from 1948. Impressed by the work-in-progress that will develop into Leda Atom­i­ca, a por­trait of Dalí’s spouse Gala influ­enced by each mythol­o­gy and sci­ence, the pho­to­graph consists of not simply that paint­ing, but additionally an arc of water and three fly­ing cats. Or at the least they appear like they’re fly­ing; in actual­i­ty, they have been thrown into the body by a crew of assis­tants includ­ing Hals­man­’s spouse and his younger daugh­ter Irene.

Irene Hals­man recollects the expe­ri­ence within the BBC Time Body video above, includ­ing the now-wide­ly recognized element that Dalí’s personal ini­tial con­cept for the pho­to concerned blow­ing up a duck with fireplace­crack­ers. “Oh, no, no, you’ll be able to’t do this,” she recollects her father reply­ing. “You’re in Amer­i­ca now. You don’t wish to be put in jail for ani­mal cru­el­ty.” So fly­ing cats it was, to be visu­al­ly cap­tured in mid-air together with the con­tents of a buck­et of water. Leda Atom­i­ca and a chair have been additionally made to look as if lev­i­tat­ing, and Dalí him­self was instruct­ed to leap, in an occasion of the pho­to­graph­ic prac­tice Hals­man known as “jumpol­o­gy” (whose oth­er sub­jects includ­ed Audrey Hep­burn, J. Robert Oppen­heimer, Mar­i­lyn Mon­roe, and Richard Nixon).

Picture by way of Library of Con­gress

Dalí Atom­i­cus was pub­lished in Life magazine­a­zine, to which Hals­man was a professional­lif­ic con­trib­u­tor. The identical concern includ­ed a number of out­takes, which revealed a few of what went into the five-to-six-hour-long strategy of nail­ing the shot. You possibly can see a number of such prints at Artwork­sy, whose labeled faults embrace “water splash­es Dalí as an alternative of cat,” “Dalí jumps too late,” and “sec­re­tary will get into pic­ture.” However it was­n’t all nearly tim­ing: the pic­ture additionally required a level of pre-Pho­to­store edit­ing to per­fect, and the emp­ty can­vas behind the soar­ing Dalí needed to be crammed in by the frenzy of the person him­self, who decide­ed to fill the non-exis­tent paint­ing with motifs drawn from the limbs of the cats. Now there was an artist who knew find out how to seize inspi­ra­tion when it float­ed by.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitch­cock Remembers Work­ing with Sal­vador Dali on Spell­certain: “No, You Can’t Pour Dwell Ants All Over Ingrid Bergman!

A Mushy Self-Por­trait of Sal­vador Dali, Nar­rat­ed by the Nice Orson Welles

Take a Jour­ney By way of 933 Paint­ings by Sal­vador Dalí & Watch His Sig­na­ture Sur­re­al­ism Emerge

Sal­vador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Unhealthy Painter” and Con­tributed “Noth­ing” to Artwork (1986)

Sal­vador Dalí Takes His Anteater for a Stroll in Paris, 1969

When Sal­vador Dalí Cre­at­ed Christ­mas Playing cards That Had been Too Avant Garde for Corridor­mark (1960)

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embrace the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the guide The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social web­work for­mer­ly referred to as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.