Example1/Dora Maar

The Simulator, 1936 by Dora Maar (1907-1997)

Example One for my Essay is photographic image created by Dora Maar in 1936 – The Simulator.
Created by a process of making a montage from two images, the first being the background and the lone figure, cut out from a crowed street photograph. After completing the montage the finished result is photographed and developed using the gelatin silver print process.

Dora Maar, born Henrietta Theodora Markovitch in Paris, France 1907, she spent her childhood and youth in Argentina, her family having moved from France due to work opportunities to her architect father. Returning to France in 1926 she studied photography and painting at the Académie Julian, but of the two disciplines, it was photography that she would attract attention, at this pointing changing her name to Dora Maar.

A chance encounter on the set of one of the French film director Jean Renoir’s movies with the artist Pablo Picasso became a tempestuous relationship that has, regrettably, defined her life more so than her own creative work. Gaining notoriety as Picasso’s ‘muse’ in paintings such as the ‘Weeping Woman’, Picasso’s Dora Maar Seated, Portrait of Dora Maar etc.

An artist herself she became a member of the Paris Surrealism movement, before exhibiting her photographic work in 1937. After seven tumultuous years, Marr’s relationship with Picasso began to deteriorate to the extent, its fallout bought Maar to the point of long depressions and a complete nervous breakdown. It would take years of treatment, requiring lengthy stays in psychiatric clinics, electroshock treatment with years of analysis.