In pictures: Jim Jarmusch on the surrealist images that inspired his films

In the closing scene of Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes (2003), two icons of the American avant-garde, Bill Rice and Taylor Mead, make a toast to “Paris in the 1920s… and New York in the 70s”. Both are historic periods marked by artistic revolution: the flourishing of NYC’s radical counterculture, and the official dawn of surrealism in 1924. And both have had a lasting influence on the filmmaker’s career, from Stranger Than Paradise to Paterson.

“As a restless teenager, surrealism was a revelation to me, first in its visual forms and then its literary ones,” Jarmusch says, ahead of this November’s Paris Photo, where he’s curated a personal selection of artworks that celebrate “this defiant and joyful artistic disruption” on its 100th anniversary. “In my early twenties it first drew me to Paris, where I repeatedly used Breton’s Nadja as a kind of walking map through the mysterious nocturnal streets of the city.” 

His selections for the 2024 edition of Paris Photo, Jarmusch adds, aren’t purely Surrealist, but “reflect its tenets of the transformation of the ordinary into the dreamlike, and at times vice-versa”. They include iconic works like David Hockney’s swimming pool photos, Peter Hujar’s morbid catacomb shots, and Robert Frank’s 1965 portrait of Jack Kerouac, alongside Lisetta Carmi’s subversive images of trans community in 1960s Genoa, Daidō Moriyama nudes, and Zanele Muholi’s contemporary exploration of race.

The collection strikes a balance between the history of surrealism (see: works by Man Ray and Dora Maar) and a more intuitive approach, notes Anna Planas, artistic director of Paris Photo. “I was very intrigued, beyond the link with surrealism, [by] the personal references. Jarmusch was a friend of Robert Frank and Arākii, and you can wander through the selection between different cities like Tokyo, Berlin or New York.”

Jarmusch’s multifaceted approach serves as a reflection of the fair as a whole, where surrealist heritage is placed alongside modern artworks inspired by the movement, using traditional forms as well as the – increasingly surreal – tools of the digital age. It’s significant that all of this comes together in Paris, Planas adds. After all, it’s where André Breton wrote and published the Surrealist Manifesto a century ago. Today, the hope is that presenting surrealist works old and new “shows the creative roots of the city and reveals how this heritage [is] still alive in contemporary art”.

Through his presence at Paris Photo, Jarmusch takes this one step further. Besides the artistic route he’s curated, and a conversation with writer Philippe Azoury on November 8, the filmmaker presents a series of Man Ray’s “striking surrealist films from the 1920s” for the fair. These four films come accompanied with new post-rock scores by SQÜRL (a band comprising Jarmusch and producer Carter Logan) that, in Planas’ words, “reactivate surrealist strategies” used in the historic works.

Paris Photo opens on November 7. In the meantime, you can view Jim Jarmusch’s selected surrealist highlights in the gallery above.