Man Ray, the experimenter
« American artist (1890-1976), key figure of Dada and Surrealism, inventor of the rayograph. »
Born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia, Man Ray arrived in Paris in 1921 and settled in Montparnasse. Painter, sculptor, filmmaker, he turned photography into a playground free of preconceptions. Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), Noire et Blanche (1926), Larmes (1932): images in which the real is bent, retouched, made up.
In 1922, by accident, he placed objects on sensitised paper and exposed them to light: the rayograph was born. Later, rediscovered with Lee Miller, solarisation gave him another visual grammar. He didn't photograph things as they were — he transformed them at the moment of capture.
A portraitist of Joyce, Stravinsky, Hemingway, Kiki of Montparnasse, Man Ray crossed the 20th-century avant-gardes without ever lasting long in any of them. His influence on advertising photography, cinema and fashion remains considerable.