Versatile and prolific photographer, artist, film-maker, and poet Man Ray created throughout his life eye catching and sensual images. The National Portrait Gallery in London is currently celebrating him with a recently opened exhibition, the first major museum retrospective dedicated to the artist, entitled “Man Ray Portraits”. The event focuses on a specific period in Man Ray's life, from 1916 to 1968 and also analyses his role as official photographer of the Dadaist and Surrealist artists.
Born Michael Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, Man Ray showed his artistic skills from a very young age. In his early twenties he moved to New York attracted also by the works exhibited at the local art gallery owned by Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer very much interested in modern European art. Soon he changed his name into Man Ray and enrolled in 1912 at the Ferrer School of Art.
He began his career as a painter, but, in 1915, he shifted his attention to photograhy, an art in which he excelled. Man Ray became indeed famous for pushing the boudaries of this medium becoming one of the most innovative photographers of the 20th century thanks to his experiments with photographic techniques and colour.
Divided in five different periods following Man Ray's life from New York to Paris and Hollywood, the exhibition includes many examples of his solarisations (a technique that turned dark edges bright), rayographs (photographs taken without a camera but produced by placing objects directly on or above the photosensitive paper; he exhibited his rayographs for the first time in 1922), negative prints at times partially coloured, montages and triple exposures.
His interest in technology prompted him to experiment further with cinema: during the '20s he shot experimental films, though, in many ways, filming techniques were already a part of his static images. His rayographs prove he had a great passion for movement, while photographs such as "Barbette", female impersonator and aerialist, show an interesting compositional complexity (think also about the ambiguous duplicity of Barbette-Vander Clyde mirrored by Man Ray's double exposure portrait of the aerialist).
"I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence," the artist once stated, yet in his career he broke the distinction between photography and painting.
In his works it is often possible to detect other forms of art: some of his images such as the iconic "Violon d’ingres" image of Kiki de Montparnasse, have indeed a sculptural quality about them; others cleverly portray a famous character without even showing them. Nancy Cunard appears for example in the exhibition through what may be considered a synecdoche: the arms covered in ivory bangles seen resting on the shoulders of jazz musician Henry Crowder are indeed hers.
While in Paris, Man Ray took photographs of friends and artists becoming the portrait photographer of Paris intellectuals, from Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso to Lee Miller, Gertrude Stein, Constantin Brancusi, and, later on, Catherine Deneuve. All of them are featured in the 150 vintage prints and works from international museums and private collections included in the National Portrait Gallery exhibition that also indirectly tackles another theme, fashion.
Man Ray broke and fractured the reality, going beyond it, and recreating it. These challenging ideas influenced other artists and photographers but also fashion designers. Though he didn't have any direct impact on fashion, Man Ray changed indeed the nature of fashion photography through his work for seminal publications such as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair.
Man Ray anticipated in his images the model/mannequin dichotomy that in later years many fashion photographers explored and reinvented: his models often ended up looking like inanimate objects or automata; his wooden mannequins seemed instead human. He also employed his experimental techniques for his images for fashion publications while some of his fashion shoots ended up in Surrealist publications.
Yet maybe we should be celebrating Man Ray the Dadaist and Surrealist also for another fashion-related reason: he was among the very first photrographers who grasped the power of what would later become a totally modern obsession, photo retouching. Legend goes that he once told a portrait client: “I have a wonderful retoucher, madam; how old do you want to be?”
Man Ray Portraits is at The National Portrait Gallery, London, until 27th May 2013.
Image credits:
Man Ray Self-portrait with camera, 1932. The Jewish Museum, New York, Purchase: Photograpy Acquisitions Committee Fund, Horace W. Goldsmith Fund, and Judith and Jack Stern Gift, 2004-16. Photo by Richard Goodbody, Inc © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris 2012 © Photo The Jewish Museum
Barbette (1926) by Man Ray. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 84.XM.1000.39 © Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAGP
Henry Crowder (1928) by Man Ray. Collection du Centre Pompidou, Mnam/Cci, Paris, AM 1994-394 (463). © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP Paris, © Centre Pompidou, Mnam-Cci, Dist. RMN/image Centre Pompidou, Mnam-Cci
Helen Tamiris (1929) by Man Ray, Collection du Centre Pompidou, Mnam/Cci, Paris, AM 1994-394 (3200). © Man Ray Trust/ADAGP Paris © Centre Pompidou, Mnam-Cci, Di st. RMN/Guy Carrard
All images courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London
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