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ONLINE COURSE
“The Optical Unconscious”: Adventures in Surrealist Photography
To the American art critic Rosalind Krauss, Surrealism has played a pivotal role in the development of art in the past 100 years. And in her landmark work, The Optical Unconscious, she developed the idea that photography has played a central role in Surrealism — for her, photography is the most surreal of the arts.
In five chapters (“Formlessness,” “Base Materialism,” “Horizontality,” “Pulse,” and “Entropy”), we follow her ideas and look at how photographers have picked up on ideas of the Surrealists and developed them even further. We’ll look at, among others, work by Lucas Blalock, Duane Michals, Sarah Moon, Aaron Siskind — and in five assignments we’ll use their work and ideas as an inspiration and starting point for our own photography.
This is a new class, so it’s for everyone — whether you’ve taken Stefan’s earlier Surrealism classes or not.
![Stefan Frank](https://strudelmedialive.com/images/uploads/strudelmediaLive_stefan-frank-600-800.jpg)
Stefan Frank is a photographer and writer, working from Heidelberg, Germany. Way before he came to photography, he studied mathematics and philosophy at Ruhr Universität Bochum and worked as an IT specialist. He studied at Atelier Smedsby with JH Engström and Margot Wallard in Paris in 2017, before he eventually began studying photography at Ostkreuzschule, Berlin, with Peter Bialobrzeski. He graduated in 2023 with the work Irgendwo (“Anywhere”), a project dealing with politically motivated crime and the terror-spree of the far right in Germany. He has been teaching with StrudelmediaLive since 2020, giving courses on surrealism, poetics of space, gestalt theory for photographers, and more. His work has been exhibited in Heidelberg, Frankfurt, and Berlin.
Stefan teaches the poetics of space, nighttime photography, and much more — including presenting The Photobook Show — for StrudelmediaLive.