Man Ray Revealed

The influence of Duchamp on Man Ray would be immeasurable. The shift of emphasis from the ‘retinal’ object to the ‘conceptual’ idea, along with a sense of humor that was both anarchic and absurdist, contributed to Man Ray’s evolving Dada-oriented sensibility. Duchamp, for Man Ray, “represented a refined balance between the lofty and the laughable,” writes Klein. “Perhaps more than any other artist, Man Ray understood the extent to which Duchamp had orchestrated his artistic life as an extension of his everyday being.” Together, they would help initiate New York Dada.

In June 1921, Man Ray wrote his friend Tristan Tzara that “since Dada cannot live in New York,” he was planning to move to Paris, where the movement’s heart was beating stronger. Man Ray expected to find an audience that didn’t care where his family came from or notice his “Brooklyn” dialect, one that honored his “American” difference, his unfixed character, and his willingness to join in fighting Europe’s old-world pretense of taste and culture—all in defiance of the inflexible values he thought his Russian Jewish family represented.

In Paris, Duchamp introduced Man Ray to the French avant-garde, including Louis Aragon, Andre Breton, Jean Cocteau, Paul Elouard, Jacques Rigaut, and Philippe Soupault. “These were youngsters who really had an ideal... a violence, an enthusiasm, a conviction, which I’d never come across in America except amongst anarchists,” Man Ray later recalled.

In order to make a living in Paris, Man Ray began photographing other artists’ work. He set up a portrait studio, and hired Berenice Abbott as his assistant. Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein were among those who sat for them. “To be ‘done’ by Man Ray and Berenice Abbott means that you were rated as somebody,” wrote Sylvia Beach, who owned the famed Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company.

Man Ray’s commercial career would flourish with the portraits and the fashion photography he did on assignment for Vanity Fair, but his introduction to Paul Poiret, the acclaimed designer, would lead to the accidental, if inauspicious, birth of the rayograph. Man Ray made his first rayographs while developing images of the designer’s work. The penumbra that surrounded the photographed object in his rayographs was seen then as a symbol of transformation beyond actual recorded form. Even today the effect possesses the aura of experimentation and imagination. But the first rayographs were immediately taken up by the fashion world. In 1922, Vanity Fair ran a portfolio of them. A decade later, Man Ray would be using the technique in an advertising campaign for a Parisian utility.

It was around this time that Man Ray began to loathe his work. In a 1936 letter to his sister, Elsie, he wrote: “I hate photography, and want to do only what is absolutely necessary to keep going, and produce something that interests me personally.... I have painted all these years.... but these one-track minded Americans have now put me down as a photographer... Do you wonder that I stay in Europe?”

And perhaps it was this contempt for photography—combined with his background as a painter, sculptor, and Dada-ist— that enabled him to employ the photographic image as a launching pad for radical expression, invention, and transformation in other mediums, as well.