Making Strange

In the upheaval following WWI and the Russian Revolution, avant-garde artists rejected traditional romantic ideals for new anti-rational, abstract movements like Futurism. A leading figure was Viktor Shklovsky, who developed the concept of "defamiliarisation" or "making strange" - using artistic techniques to obscure familiar objects and perceptions to force the viewer to experience them anew. This challenged passive consumption of art in favour of an active process of perception and reconstruction. Futurist painters like Malevich embraced abstraction to radically defamiliarize art, while poets and writers experimented with unconventional language and narrative techniques. Though short-lived, Making Strange captured the radical imagination of an era of upheaval, when avant-garde artists sought to remake reality itself. In this post, Alun Misra connects the strategies used by the Futurists to photography now, and describes how he has used some these in his work and why.