Man Ray and Sally Mann

Paper Summary:

Although separated by about seven decades, this paper explains that Man Ray and Sally Mann are both 20th century photographers whose work has been preoccupied with surrealist imagery. It looks at how both artists have gone against the grain of popular styles, defying trends in their individual ways. Both were concerned with romanticism and both strove to capture an altered reality in their work. It concludes that the absurdity of fashion and the disembodied female form held Ray's interest, while for Mann, the absurdity of childhood and parenting occupies her stills.

From the Paper:

"Early in his career as an artistic pioneer in a variety of media, Man Ray was a founder of the Dadaist Movement of New York with Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia. [1] However, some of his most interesting work was done during his time as a fashion photographer for the great design houses of Paris. For Ray, the world of fashion was attractive because of its strange metaphors: reality vs. fantasy, and the thin line that holds them apart. Ray's style was couched in his ideas of the unreality of fashion, yet it stood in stark visual contrast to the surrealist aesthetic of the time, which also liked to challenge the "reality" of standard fashion."

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