Self-Portrait

Distortions of the human figure, was a popular subject among surrealist artists who liked to transform the familiar into something strange. Herbert List’s distorted Self-Portrait depicts a stretched and undulating figure, which was part of his “fotografia metafisica” style. List, who photographed Paris’s artistic avant-garde, was influenced by their surrealist and Bauhaus aesthetics and experimented with exposure, masks, and fabric to make “visions where my arrangements try to capture the magical essence of inhabiting and animating the world of experience.”