Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky; 1890-1976), American photographer who worked in many media, and whose innovative photographs challenged boundaries between art and fashion, commercial and fine art, fact and fiction. He was a pioneer in propelling the photographic medium into an avant-garde art form. Born in Philadelphia, he spent the early years of his career in New York, where he came into contact with Stieglitz and his circle and met Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. An inveterate experimenter and iconoclast, he was drawn to the irreverent Dada spirit, as manifested in such early New York photographs as Man and Woman (1918). These compositions demonstrate his provocative use of the medium as a conceptual rather than documentary tool. Moving to Paris in 1921, he was embraced by members of the Dada and embryonic Surrealist movements. His experimental cameraless images, named Rayographs, were heralded as paradigmatic Dada expressions and reproduced with a preface by Tristan Tzara in Les Champs délicieux (1922). His camera became his entrée into diverse Parisian milieus throughout the 1920s and 1930s, placing him and his photographs at the centre of vanguard artistic activities, celebrity circles, and the fashion world. His iconic photograph Noire et blanche, published in Paris Vogue in 1926, epitomizes the artist's idiosyncratic approach to the medium. Situated at the intersection of modernist interest in l'art nègre with the fashion world, this image formally and psychologically juxtaposes an African mask with the head of his lover Kiki, inflecting the composition with irony and ambiguity. Such images reflect Man Ray's multifaceted engagement with photography, summed up in his own words: ‘I do not photograph nature, I photograph my fantasy.’ In the process, he often manipulated the medium through techniques such as solarization and image reversals, evoking the dreamlike world of Surrealism. His characteristically enigmatic statements about photography include ‘The Age of Light’ (1933) and ‘Photography is Not Art’ (1937). After two decades of prolific artistic activity in Paris, he was forced by events in Europe to return to the USA in 1940. He spent the war years in Hollywood, where he worked prodigiously across media until his return to Paris in 1951. Although he participated in a number of exhibitions while in the USA, he felt largely misunderstood and under-appreciated in his native land. His autobiographical Self-Portrait (1963) is an orchestrated compilation of personal musings published during a late revival of his career. Man Ray influenced the development of photographic practices in the 20th century not only through his diverse and innovative oeuvre but also through the numerous photographers who apprenticed with him, including Berenice Abbott, Lee Miller, Curtis Moffat, Jacques-André Boiffard, and Bill Brandt..
— Wendy A. Grossman
Bibliography
- Foresta, M. (ed.), Perpetual Motif: The Art of Man Ray (1988).
- Grossman, W., “‘ (Con) Text and Image: Reframing Man Ray's Noire et blanche’”, in A. Hughes and A. Noble (eds.), Phototextualities: Intersections of Photography and Narrative (2003).
- Sayag, A., and L'Écotais, E. de (eds.), Man Ray: Photography and its Double (1998)
