It was a forest, a sheet, a chair, a frame and nobody but himself that led the Pennsylvania-based photographer, Christopher Ryan McKenney, to take the first picture of his series of surreal photography, which was taken in the remote woods of his Wilkes-barre neighborhood.

His photographs are mostly faceless. The subjects are either covered by cloth over their heads, burned in fire, or just simply headless; a basic concept that is so scary and frightening yet somehow McKenney managed to make the results so beautifully haunting regardless of their scary concept.

McKenney does not reveal the identity of the human subject in most of his pictures.  He explained that he likes “taking away identity when photographing and to leave people thinking.”

In his photograph of a man whose head is covered by a lampshade and with the falling lampshades surrounding him, I interpreted it as a representation of a human’s mind that is highly influenced by numerous external factors surrounding it. However, according to the photographer himself, it is actually a depiction of “people having ideas but covering them up in fear of failure or what other people will think.”

Surreal art works are indeed prone to multi-interpretation. However, that is actually one of its perks that makes people find them interesting. Given this fact, McKenney reacted to it with “I only make the photos I do to express myself and what other people see or think is up to them, as long as I make them feel anything, I’m ok with that”

McKenney’s works might as well remind us about the works of the famous Belgian surrealist artist Rene Magritte as both of them emphasize the paradoxical idea of unveiling what lies beneath the pictures by concealing it.

Magritte, in his“The Son of Man” painting which depicts a man whose face is hidden by a green apple tried to show the viewers that everything we see hides another thing; so did McKenney in his photographs by, for example, hiding the identities of his human objects.

Surrealism, as for myself, is the style of art that triggers what is really in you; it crosses the boundaries of what normally belongs to social conformity and expresses what actually lies within, enabling the works of it to be distinctive and brutally honest.

Text by Siti Hartinah Putri