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Roger Parry began his photographic career in 1928 in the service of advertising and architectural design. To accompany a 1930 edition of poet Leon-Paul Fargue’s Banalité, the artist created a series of enigmatic photographic illustrations. The Banalité images work as a complement to Fargue’s Symbolist poetry, recasting a group of unrelated scenes into a cryptic sequence. Like this image of a locomotive, many of the illustrations are negative prints, cropped at dramatic angles; others include cameraless images (photograms), which Parry would have associated with the work of Man Ray. After meeting Parry in Paris, Julien Levy included the artist’s photographs in several exhibitions at his Manhattan galleries, including Surréalisme and Modern European Photography in 1932. In addition to purchasing the Banalité photographs, Levy acquired storyboards for a photographic series that Parry planned but never finalized, which indicated the artist’s intentions to continue exploring the photo-narrative as an effective art form.

Hammer and Anvil