Dora Maar's decision to become a photographer was, from a certain point of view, pragmatic. Commercial commissions offered greater stability than painting, her original training. But this choice was also ambitious. Coming from a bourgeois family, she did not need to work out of financial necessity. However, Maar belonged to that generation of women photographers eager to seize the opportunities created by the rise of advertising and the illustrated press between the two wars.

Dora Maar carried out numerous commissioned works for avant-garde magazines (Paris-Magazine), and for glamour magazines (Séduction, Secrets de Paris, Beauté Magazine), which shared a common celebration of the photographic nude. Her photographs of Assia Granatouroff are particularly well known, published as they were in both avant-garde and racy magazines alike. Her friend Jacqueline Lamba, whose beauty electrified all of Paris, was a model of choice for these experiments.

The shot is probably the last of a studio session of 9 photographs, catalogued in the Centre Pompidou collections inventory from AM 2004-0163 (47) to AM 2004-0163 (55). Unlike the studio portraits of her intimates, the photographs of Jacqueline present genuine staged scenes. The light and the juxtaposition with the glass object (AM 2004-0163 (48)), the view from below with a candlestick (AM 2004-0163 (49)), the illuminated coral, also used in other photomontages for its abstract, spongy appearance (AM 2004-0163 (50)), the drapery (AM 2004-0163 (51)). The nudes appear more "academic", and this last photograph is likewise a staged scene.

This photograph shows a three-quarter view of Jacqueline Lamba, of which only the bust is visible. The scene differs from those nudes in its staging. In the original print, Jacqueline Lamba opens her palm, suggesting she is holding something in her hand. The scene appears complete only through Dora Maar's intervention in the darkroom. This is the signature of Surrealist Dora Maar, who builds her scene through the superimposition of contradictory elements.

Jacqueline Lamba à la flèche [Jacqueline Lamba with the Arrow] is a bridge between these two facets of Dora Maar's photographic work. The choice of model further reinforces this link between the photographic nude and Surrealist composition. Jacqueline Lamba, the inspiration for André Breton's Amour fou, is the symbol of Surrealist femininity. Beyond her physical beauty, it is the artistic complicity emanating from these images that is so striking.

This photograph is a manifesto of feminine creativity and of the friendship binding the two artists. It is not known whether this photograph was taken before Jacqueline Lamba met André Breton, but it was around this time that Dora Maar and Jacqueline Lamba drew closer to Surrealist circles, notably by signing André Breton's Appel à la lutte. With this montage, Dora Maar profoundly alters the purpose of nude photography. The dishevelled overpainting at the bottom of the photograph concentrates the composition, and combined with the presence of the arrow, refocuses the gaze on Jacqueline Lamba's eyes.

What could be an ode to the female body becomes an intriguing scene: the arrow (or the clock hand) introduces a mechanical element at odds with bodily pleasure. Thus Dora Maar creates this strange dissonance that characterises her work.

This work, shown at the Dora Maar retrospective at the Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern (which was also to travel to the Getty Museum), is one of the rare Dora Maar photomontages still in private hands.