The Darkroom as Weapon? Anti-Colonialism and Ethnography in Raoul Ubac's Penthésilée Photomontages

Belgian Surrealist Raoul Ubac’s Penthésilée photomontages (1937-39) depict imagined scenes of graphic violence that fragment the female body to the point of rendering it illegible. This representational violence occurs not only on the iconographic level, but is also embedded in the surface of the photograph through the use of darkroom techniques such as solarization and brûlage. While Ubac’s photomontages have been examined through the lenses of Surrealist misogyny and the Spanish Civil War, they have not yet been considered in relation to the visual record of Belgian colonial violence in the Congo. Reading the iconography of Ubac’s images and his engagement with the legend of the ancient Amazons, this thesis analyzes the ways in which Ubac deployed the image of the Amazon as a gendered and racial “Other.” Ubac took as his sources of inspiration the Greek myth of the Amazonian queen, and Heinrich von Kleist’s Romantic play Penthesilea (1808), both of which frame Penthesilea as inferior to her Greek foe/lover, Achilles. By putting Ubac’s use of the Penthesilea myth in the context of the Surrealist movement’s anti-colonialist stance and the group’s ethnographic interest in “primitive” cultures, this thesis shows how Ubac critiqued photography’s use as a tool of imperialism while still mobilizing a primitivist discourse that supported and enabled colonial violence.