André Kertész, Daisy Bar, 1934

If you missed the Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris exhibit at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts this fall, you have another chance to see this evocative collection of Surrealist photographs. The exhibit reopens at the International Center of Photography in New York on January 29.

The exhibit is guest-curated by Therese Lichtenstein, author of the accompanying book, Twilight Visions: Surrealism and Paris. In her essay The City in Twilight, Lichtenstein characterizes Paris in the 1920s and 1930s as a city in transition, giving way to new technologies, suspended between the old ways and the new.

The surrealist photographers André Kertész, Brassai, Man Ray, and others wandered through the changing Paris streets and alleys, shadowed halls and towering rooftops, seeking to capture the uncertainty and contradiction of the in-between space between light and dark, fantasy and reality, ancient and modern. Their dreamscapes capture the mystery beneath the surface of Paris, at a time when the past had not quite crumbled and the future had not quite descended.

In this video from Nashville Public Television Arts Break, curator Katie Delmez puts the exhibit into cultural and historical context.

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