Photomontage—combining and rephotographing images—was a popular technique among Surrealist artists as a way to blur the lines between art and reality. In The Simulator, Dora Maar turned a preexisting photograph of an interior at the Palace of Versailles upside down and combined it with her own image of a child bending backwards. Because Maar carefully maintained a sense of scale suggestive of reality, the work is especially unsettling and dreamlike.