Man Ray
The Surrealist of photography.
Man Ray experimented with photograms, solarisation and objects. His Le Violon d'Ingres turns a woman's back into a violin.
Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 in Philadelphia into a Jewish immigrant family. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He turned down a scholarship to study architecture, wanting instead to become an artist. The great Armory Show of 1913 and the photographer Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291 opened his eyes to modern art.
In 1915 he met Marcel Duchamp, who became a lifelong friend. Together they were central figures in New York Dada. In 1921 Man Ray moved to Paris, where he joined the circles of the Dadaists and later the Surrealists. That same year he made Gift, a flat iron with a row of nails glued to its underside, one of Surrealism's famous objects.
He took up photography to document works of art but became one of the most innovative photographers of his time. He made photograms, which he called rayographs, by placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing them to light. With Lee Miller, who was his assistant and partner around 1930, he developed solarisation, in which the image is exposed to light during developing so that the outlines take on a metallic sheen. He also made portraits of artists and writers, fashion photography for magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, and experimental films.
Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres's Violin) of 1924 shows the model Kiki de Montparnasse from behind with two sound holes painted on her back. The title is a play on words: in French the expression means a hobby. In 2022 a print of the image sold for more than twelve million dollars, a record for a photograph.
When Germany invaded France in 1940, he fled to California. There he married Juliet Browner in 1946. In 1951 he returned to Paris, where he died in 1976. He saw himself primarily as a painter, but it is the photographs and objects that have made him one of the leading figures of Surrealism and modern photography.