Image-making is our preference for what we imagine to what there is to be seen. (Wright Morris)

One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld - a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. (Walter Benjamin)

Woman is the being who throws the greatest shadow or the greatest light on our dreams. (Charles Baudelaire)

Our era and surrealism seem destined for one another. One can cite numerous examples from the events of recent times which prove our age is ipso facto surreal, and in retrospect it is hardly surprising that Andre Breton's famous manifesto of 1925, 'Manifeste du Surrealisme' provoked an intoxicating frenzy of art during the 20s and 30s. Man Ray, Salvadore Dali, Rene Magritte and Max Ernst formed some of the stellar cast ensnared by what Breton called 'the convulsions of beauty'.

Today, artists, particularly photographers, continue to profitably mine the surrealist veins of chance events, dream imagery and the erotic human form. In England, for example, there is a strong current of Surrealist imagery. Look at Bill Brandt, Angus McBean, Allan Dutton, and Nigel Henderson. America has its share of surrealist photographers too; Jerry Uelsmann, C.J. Laughlin, and Joseph Mills, for example. And now we can add another English photographer, to that list, Dominic Rouse.

Many people confide their dreams over the breakfast table. Dominic Rouse grabs our arm and beckons us to look inside his head. There an irrational, (yet strangely logical) dream

world unfolds. It is a surreal landscape over which the cross, the skull, the knife, and the hangman's noose cast their shadows. It is a land of the anima, Jung's term for the feminine side of the male. Rouse's anima are delicate female figures, part mannequin, part human, always beautiful.

They lose their heads to become vessels for strange botanical growths as they brandish clippers, mirrors, flowers, all apparently parodies of Freudian symbology. The vase-women undergo their metamorphoses enclosed in ecclesiastical spaces where the secular and the sacred uneasily co-exist.

But as the tone darkens, the eroticism of nudity and lingerie become more apparent as gothic arches, buttresses and stained glass become more prominent. Windows open to reveal miniature renaissance landscapes. Chimera is gently displaced by motifs of mutilation and death in the increasingly sombre tones of these beautifully executed photographs. Symbology is no longer parodic; dark spaces expand to enclose the figures and there is more temptation for the viewer to leap into a Freudian quagmire.

In 'Cloisterphobia' a beautiful woman seems more real than imagined despite being headless. Dressed for the boudoir in a pyjama top and underwear she was apparently filing her nails before finding herself inside a cathedral. In fact she is becoming a cathedral because replacing her head and feet are gothic columns. In another image, a ballerina dances in an empty theatre beneath a crucifix. In another, a female figure becomes the crucified and here the sacred and the sensual have their closest encounter. The empty theatre re-appears again but this time the female figure finally has a head - but now is missing a body.

There are male figures in Rouse's dream world too; men who lose their bodies and are swallowed up by household furniture. Not all the women are in church; one becomes a lamp in a manor house and with another nude, a champagne glass metamorphoses into a groin. Some of the images are homages to Rouse's mentors: shoes sprout toes a la Magritte and there are pictures that recall Jerry Uelsmann's meditations on the feminine aspects of nature.

One thing the photographs all have in common and that is impeccable craft. Many of the pictures had their genesis in drawings made years ago and the images are constructed more like sculptural works or films than photographs. Rouse often builds sets for his fantasies (and destroys them after the photograph is realised) and each image requires numerous sessions which later are digitally combined on a computer. The final image is then outputted as a film negative which in turn is printed onto fibre-based photographic paper. Finally, the resulting silver print is bathed in toners which gives the prints their warm colour.

That journey from inspiration to highly crafted reality gives these exquisite images a gravitas that belies the lightness of their touch. In a way as they move from a theatrical set to a computer to a chemically developed silver print these pictures traverse the history of photography itself. But more important to the photographer, and perhaps for his viewers too, is the internal journey we make through the vivid imagination of a skilled artist, Dominic Rouse.

Profesor Victor H carroll