Man Ray

Paper Summary:

This paper describes the photography of Man Ray, describing both his spirit of innovation and his enormous talent for the photographic medium. The paper discusses Ray's early career, his interest in photography, his work in New York and Paris, his surrealist and Dadaist works and his influence on the mainstream (and often upper class) dress fashions of the late 1930s.

From the Paper:

"Ray's interest in photography grew stronger in the 1920s. He showed a masterful control of camera and dark room skills, but he was most notably an innovator. He helped re-instate the cliche-verre method of making direct photographic reproductions of drawings on glass. He used a variety of methods to produce photographic images without using a camera by "placing translucent objects on sensitized paper, adjusting lights at various angles, moving objects and/or lights above and across the paper, and at times actually immersing objects in the developer during exposure." [Perpetual, p. 27] If photography was machine-art, then Ray's photographs without a camera were even harder to categorize, an unidentifiable realm of artistic mystery. Although not entirely of his own invention, Ray's experimentation with these forms of exposure led to a liberation in the modernist's way of interpreting reality."

More papers on Man Ray:

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• Comparison Essay # 64493 : "Man Ray and Sally Mann"

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