Man Ray comments

L3

MAN RAY

Man Ray was a photographer who did not observe the rules of photography. Man Ray had no formal training in photography, the first influential person he met, being Alfred Steiglitz, the great pioneer of American photography. But at no time was he a disciple, nor were his photographs like Stielitz’s. Man Ray’s images are clear cut, even harsh, his figures crisply outlined, as though they had been cut out with a sharp knife. Where did this restless American learn to take photographs? Purely from himself.

One point sets Man Ray apart from other photographers. He was first and foremost a painter, and a brilliant one at that. But, a photographer emerged from the side of the painter. The painter projected his light and shade into his photographs. Man ray was born with the spirit of a painter,but the mind of a photographer.

When he was very young, and thought he saw his future in becoming a painter, he experimented with a few strange images produced by the sun, shining through a leaf onto a sheet of printing paper. He did not know it, but he had already ‘invented’ photography on his own account.

He used simple cameras costing just few dollars. In his old age, he still preferred his old camera models which were somewhat rudimentary, but possibly less hostile, with a man in charge of the machine and the photographer not reduced to a mere robot pressing the button.

He was in fact the first American artist to become a Dadist, which was another way of being an anarchist at that period (around 1912). Therein lay his freedom. Man Ray liked mixing materials, mixing equipment, mixing everything he used and even things he saw. The photographic paper becme a painting and the painting was sometimes mistaken for a photograph.

What mattered was the way it was photographed and, basically, the will behind the photograph. No one expects Man Ray’s photographs to show Landscapes, even when they include a snatch of landscape. You will never find him photographing scenes from an earthquake, a war, or even the nightlife of Paris (which he frequented, largely through curiosity), or city scenes. No, for Man Ray the photograph was something else, it was astate of mind, a spiritual condition.

He sometimes constructed absurd objects simply to photograph them, of took photographs to build concrete objects from them. In a certain sense, Man Ray constructed the photograph even before it became a photograph.

He was constantly striving to prevent the things he photographed from becoming photographs or look like photographs. He discovered he could even do away with his camera. The results of his experiments were the famous “ Rayographs”. A Rayograph is produced simply by placing a few objects on a piece of photographic paper and exposing them rapidly to light. The Rayograph was quickly followed as a natural development by another darkroom technique – that of the Sabbatier effect, or solarisation, re-exposure of the negative or print during development to create a dark rim around the contours of the subject.

The 1920’s were a period of intense photographic intensity for Man Ray. His painting was not really understood at this time, his exhibition in December 1921 was a complete failure. He was an individualist, but never allowed himself any malicious or adverse criticism of his colleagues, whose works he always respected. At most, he ignored them or they ignored him,

To maintain is independence, he preferred to fashion photographs for Vogue and Harpers’ Bazzar . But even these photographs look a bit Dadist. They are primarily scenographic inventions. The accent is never on the dress or hat, but on the model wearing it, or on a dramatic or psychological situation. It is a theatrical production, we can even forget the name of the designer. What is left is the description of an imaginary event, invented to please the photographer.

In the years between the wars, he also did a lot of portraits in his Paris studio. Many famous names passed before his camera, Picasso, Miro, Breton, de Chirico, Braque, Brancusi, Lee Miller, to name but a few. But are they really portraits? Portraits yes, of very high quality, but on occasions subtle inventions of the type produced in America. Here, too, the models become shadows, ghosts, people, protagonists of the fantastic and slightly bizarre story of his own invention. In the famous back view of ‘Kiki’ of Monparnasse, Violon d’Ingres, is a reconstruction of the painting Bain Turc by Ingres, just to remind us that his photography is always a continuation or a projection of painting.

Man Ray ‘invented’ everything, he ‘invented’ the camera and even the subject of the photograph. Man ray was really ‘writing’ with his photographs. Behind the photographer and behind the painter was the writer and this is crucial to an understanding of Man Ray.

He also photographed himself with a half beard, before a mirror, dressed as a women or priest, surrounded by his paintings, as if by some wizardry he had just stepped out of them. But the photographic self portrait, like his other photographs, was always a mental disguise. When world war II broke out and the Germans invaded France in 1940, he had to return to America, where he lived in Hollywood, finally leaving the camera behind, to devote his time to reproducing his paintings left behind in France, but this was not his forte.

But once the war and immediate postwar period were over, he returned to Paris in spite of some misgivings, where other memories awaited him and the demon of the camera reappeared in his life. The photographs he took this time were secret and personal, he showed no one. Man Ray had also said “ I paint what cannot be photographed; I photograph what i do wish to paint”.

He remained faithful to this concept.