Dreams (Spanish: Sueños) by Grete Stern comprises 140 weekly photomontages made in Argentina from 1948 to 1951 for Idilio magazine's dream-interpretation page, centering on dreams submitted largely by its female readership.
The commission paired Stern with sociologist Gino Germani, who directed the literary and interpretive component under the pseudonym Richard Rest and supplied readers' narratives, sometimes with visual instructions. Made during the first Peronist period, the series brings avant-garde montage, popularized psychoanalysis, and mass publishing into contact. Its recurring concern is a middle-class woman in conflict with domestic expectations, romantic desire, work, and prescribed femininity. Stern described her purpose in editorial and formal terms, while later scholars have read the pictures' irony as unsettling the magazine's more conventional models of womanhood.
Across the black-and-white images, the dreamer is present either as a female figure or through the camera's viewpoint. Domestic interiors, appliances, bottles, trains, water, eyes, flowers, and celestial space meet through abrupt superimposition. Women shrink, float, become enclosed, or confront outsized objects, producing shifts among anxiety, absurdity, and humor. The compositions distort scale and perspective yet remain legible for a weekly magazine. In Botella del mar, for example, a seated girl appears inside a real bottle against clouds and a beach.
These incongruities arose from Stern's earlier graphic-design and montage practice. Working under weekly deadlines at home, she began with pencil sketches, then combined archived negatives with photographs made for each assignment. She enlarged and cut components, pasted them into arrangements, added graphic accents, retouched details, and rephotographed the assembly. At times she spaced elements on glass, sticks, or cardboard like a stage, using distance, focus, light, and shadow to shape the image.
Initially encountered within Idilio, Dreams gained popular visibility but little contemporary art-critical attention. It was first shown autonomously at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata in the mid-1950s, followed by a 1967 Buenos Aires exhibition. Recognition grew from the 1980s onward through exhibitions including IVAM in 1995–96 and later MALBA presentations. Because Editorial Abril discarded the original collage boards and Stern retained only 46 reproduction negatives, later accounts depended on both prints and surviving magazine pages. The 2003 CEPPA publication reconstructed all 140 works, reinforcing the series' understanding as both photographic art and a hybrid product of psychoanalysis, editorial design, and mass culture.
