This paper examines the coincidence that three surrealist photographers all chose to photograph a woman's head in a bell jar, between 1925 and 1930, although only one was published at the time-Man Ray's Hommage à D.A.F. de Sade. Each of these images provokes, yet in different ways-inspiring repulsion, sympathy, and empathetic concern. All of them respond to the growing fascination with headlessness in the 1930s and all of them enact aspects of the photographic medium-from it ghostly aspects to its appeal to the sense of touch, intertwined as it is with the sense of sight in the process of photographic production itself.