Man Ray

« Personally I always preferred inspiration to information »

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radintzky) born on August 27, 1890 was an American modernist painter who later started using his artist skills with photography. He started working with a cubist style of painting but slowly grew into abstraction works of art. He spent most of his career in Paris, France where he met artist Marcel Duchamp in 1915, they collaborated often and together created the group the Dada Artists in New York. In 1921 he moved to Paris and fit right in with the Surrealist artists and writers clique. His ideal image was to create a photograph that didn’t look like an actual photograph but a work of art, he called these « camera less » photographs: rayographs. He achieved this by making « mistakes » in his dark room. These photos were made by placing and manipulating objects on pieces of photosensitive paper. Man Ray found some of his early inspiration in 1913 at the Armory Show, which featured the work of Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kadinsky, and Marcel Duchamp. He was a serious hit during the Dada movement in New York. (Dadaism, was an art movement of the European avant-garde that started in Zurich, Switzerland in the early 20th century).

His most famous work of art of this time was « The Gift » it was normally meant to be a gift for the art gallery owner that was hosting his first solo show in Paris. He added it to the exposition last minute. He took a simple iron and turned it into some what of a story with just a few tacks.

In 1921, he was hanging out with a literary and artist crowd that included Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein. He got most of his fame by taking portraits of his literary and artists associates. One of his all time most famous photographs was in 1924, » Violin d’Ingres » it was inspired by a neoclassic painting by Jean August Dominique d’Ingres. He photographes his lover at the time Kiki and added two black shapes so that her naked back would look like an instrument.

Violon d’Ingres 1924

He played often with techniques, Sabatier effect or solarization which adds a tint of silver which makes the image look a little ghostly.

He ended up finding a new muse in the 1930’s names Lee Miller, who featured in a few of his photographs such as: « Object to be destroyed » and « Observatory Time » 1936. Shortly after he fled European war and moved to California and married dancer and model Juliet Browner in 1946. He died in Paris on Novembre 18, 1976 and was buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse where his wife was later buried with him in 1991, her epitaph reads « together again ».