Man Ray

   Man Ray

Man Ray, original name Emmanuel Radnitzky, August 27, 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, photographer, painter, and filmmaker, is the only American to play a prominent role in both the Dada and Surrealist movements.

Son of Jewish immigrants, Radnitzky grew up in New York, where he studied architecture, engineering and art, and became a painter. He took the pseudonym Man Ray as early as 1911. As a young man, he regularly visited Alfred Stieglitz's “291” gallery, where he was exposed to current art trends and gained an early appreciation for photography. In 1915 Man Ray met French artist Marcel Duchamp and together they collaborated on many inventions and formed the New York Dada artists group. Like Duchamp, Man Ray began producing off-the-shelf, commercially produced objects that he referred to as works of art. Among his best-known ready-made products is The Gift (1921), a flat iron with a string of fasteners attached to the bottom.

In 1921 Man Ray moved to Paris and became associated with Parisian Dada and Surrealist circles of artists and writers. Inspired by the liberation supported by these groups, he tried many media. His experiments with photography included reinventing how "cameraless" pictures, or photograms he called rayographs, were made. He did this by placing objects directly on the photosensitive paper he had exposed and developed. In 1922, a book of his radiographs, Les Champs délicieux ("Fields of Delight") was published, featuring a foreword by the influential Dada artist Tristan Tzara, who was fascinated by the enigmatic quality of Man Ray's images. In 1929, with her lover, photographer and model Lee Miller, Man Ray experimented with a technique called solarization, which during development exposes a print or negative to a flash of light, making a photographic image part negative and part positive. He and Miller were among the first artists to use the process known since the 1840s for aesthetic purposes.

Man Ray also did fashion and portrait photography and made an almost complete photographic record of the celebrities of Parisian cultural life during the 1920s and 30s. Many of her photos have been published in magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Vu, and Vogue. He continued his photography experiments on the portrait genre; for example, he gave a caregiver three pairs of eyes, and in Le Violon d'Ingres (1924) he photographically placed the sound holes or f-holes over a photograph of a naked woman's back, making her body look like a woman's. violin. It also continued to produce ready-made products. A metronome with a photograph of an eye fixed on a pendulum was dubbed Object to Destroy (1923) by anti-Dada rebels in 1957.

In 1940, Man Ray escaped the German occupation of Paris by moving to Los Angeles. He continued painting and experimenting until his death, returning to Paris in 1946. His autobiography, Self-Portrait, was published in 1963 (reprinted in 1999).