the Cats, the Water, the Chair, and the Photo

If you are avidly interested in photography, you surely must have heard of the Dalí Atomicus, shot by dear friend Philippe Halsman in 1948. In it is me, of course, a bucket of water, three cats in the air and suspended furniture floating around. 

Before we settled on the idea for this iconic photo, my first idea was to have a duck blown up with dynamite for it. Of course, in the end it turned out Halsman opposing this was a good action because in the end, it took us 26 attempts at getting the perfect shot. For each take, Halsman’s assistants—including his wife, Yvonne, and one of his daughters, Irene—tossed the cats and the contents of a full bucket across the frame. After each attempt, Halsman developed and printed the film while Irene dried off the cats. It took some intense preparation to get there, too.

Halsman was always focused on reflecting the people's nature in his photos. He always said that this was especially difficult with me, with the surrealism in my works and my personality not easily reflectable into these photos. But we always succeeded in the end, and we were both pretty satisfied with the photos.

The first portrait that Halsman took of me in 1941 cemented our friendship. It led to work such as the absurdist book Dalí’s Mustache, featuring 36 views of my famous mustache.

 Other compositions, which placed me in worlds not unlike those of my own imagination, took time and painstaking detail to pull off. 

In Popcorn Nude, I had to high kick as popcorn kernels and baguettes exploded around a nude model. 

And to create In Voluptas Mors, it took Halsman three hours to arrange the women’s bodies so that they formed the illusion of a skull!

Dalí Atomicus was just an early example of the practice Halsman called “jumpology.” To capture the true spirit of his subjects—primarily celebrities and public figures who were accustomed to having a lens trained on them—he began asking them to take a jump after each photo session. “When you ask a person to jump, his attention is mostly directed toward the act of jumping and the mask falls so that the real person appears,” he once explained.

The best thing about working with Halsman was that there was no rivalry between us; Halsman never even thought of picking up a brush, and I wasn't planning on picking up a camera soon either. 

But when we came together, we were able to create the upmost wonderful works.