PHO150 Digital Photography: Man Ray

Briefly discusses Man Ray's approach to photography and gathers a selection of his portraits, nudes, abstracts, and still lifes.

Catalogue from an exhibition of works by Man Ray which capture the extraordinary and sensual images which made him one of the 20th century's famous and original photographers. Known for his iconic images and haunting portraits of his many friends and colleagues.

Recognized as the most original photographer of the 20th century, Man Ray delighted the avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s with daring, creative experimentation. He was the first Surrealist photographer, a gifted rebel with an incisive eye and a passion for freedom and pleasure. This outstanding monograph sheds new light on Man Ray's photographic genius -- incredibly, around one third of these images have never before been published. Visually spectacular and intellectually stimulating it shatters the myth -- cultivated by Man Ray himself -- that his photographic creativity resulted from timely mistakes and chance occurrences. Featured are many of his solarizations, rayographs, unconventional portraits and sensual nudes.

Inspired by a unique artistic vision grounded in the deliberate irrationality of Dada and the incongruous vision of Surrealism, Ray created a gallery of striking photographs: unforgettable images that etch themselves into the mind and transform our perceptions of reality. This beautiful large-format volume reproduces on coated stock a rich selection of these works, created amid the intellectual and artistic ferment of the 20's and 30's. To achieve his remarkable effects, Ray experimented with various techniques: over and under exposure, shooting through different fabrics, superimposing images, and zeroing in on tiny details.

Masterful collection of 60 works by a supreme artist with an unerring ability to capture his subjects’ personality on film. Revealing portraits of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and many other luminaries.

Man Ray (1890-1976), a founding father of Dada and a key player in French Surrealism, is one of the central artists of the twentieth century. He is also one of the most elusive. In this new biography, journalist and critic Arthur Lubow uses Man Ray's Jewish background as one filter to understand his life and art. Man Ray began life as Emmanuel Radnitsky, the eldest of four children born in Philadelphia to a mother from Minsk and a father from Kiev. When he was seven the family moved to the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, where both parents worked as tailors. Defying his parents, expectations that he earn a university degree, Man Ray instead pursued his vocation as an artist, embracing the modernist creed of photographer and avant-garde gallery owner Alfred Stieglitz. When at the age of thirty Man Ray relocated to Paris, he, unlike Stieglitz, made a clean break with his past.

During a career that spanned more than fifty years, two continents, and work in many media, Man Ray (1890-1976) produced a large body of photographic images that continue to command our attention. This volume presents his early work in New York in the 1910s, selections from his sizeable Paris oeuvre in the 20s, 30s, and 50s, and photographs taken during his time in Hollywood in the 40s. Though in later years he expressed a desire to be remembered as a painter, Man Ray continued to work with photography throughout his life, pushing the boundaries of the medium with cameraless images, solarized portraits, and other innovations. The Getty Museum's collection of three hundred works by Man Ray includes vintage prints from the 1910s through the 1960s. This volume presents more than fifty photographs, with commentary on each image by Katherine Ware, assistant curator of photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. The volume also includes an overview of his life and the edited transcript of a symposium on his career.