In 1915 in New York, a young painter named Man Ray was introduced to the artist Marcel Duchamp.
But Man Ray spoke no French, and Duchamp knew little English, so they played a game of tennis.
Duchamp scandalized the art world in 1917
when he anonymously submitted an ordinary plumbing fixture to an art exhibition.
This was one of several everyday objects Duchamp presented as art and called readymades.
The two of them shared ideas, and Man Ray began experimenting,
making art from whatever materials were lying around his studio.
He had initially taken up the camera to photograph his own work,
but now he began making evocative pictures of ordinary objects, in a sense,
a photographic answer to Duchamp's readymades.
In 1920, he photographed a kitchen mixer and an assemblage of objects from his darkroom.
He called these two pictures Man and Woman.
The two artists produced many works in collaboration,
and Man Ray helped Duchamp create his alter ego, Eros St. Lave.
But Duchamp returned to France, and Man Ray found himself out of sorts.
In 1921, he too set sail for Paris.
There he was taken in by a group of poets, artists, and anarchists who admired
and embraced his work in ways New York had not.
Still, in the midst of this thriving culture of creative thinkers, he struggled to make a living.
To support himself, he took up portrait photography.
If I'd had the nerve, I'd have become a thief or a gangster.
Since I didn't, I became a photographer.
The writers, the intellectuals, and artists living in Paris at that time
began to seek him out to have their portraits taken.
Once, when working in the darkroom, he made an accidental discovery when he dropped an
unexposed sheet into the developer.
Regretting the waste of paper, I mechanically placed a small glass funnel
to graduate in the thermometer on the wetted paper. I turned on the light.
Before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette,
but distorted and refracted by the glass.
Taking whatever objects came to hand, my hotel room key, a handkerchief,
some pencils, a brush, a candle, a piece of twine,
I made a few more prints, excitedly enjoying myself immensely.
They looked startlingly new and mysterious.
He named his new creation the radiograph.
He wrote triumphantly to a patron, I have finally freed myself from the sticky medium
of paint and am working directly with light itself.
For all their simplicity, the radiographs powerfully evoked space and movement.
He orchestrated complex compositions,
often making multiple exposures for a single picture,
and coaxed mysterious shadows out of ordinary objects.
Over the next decade, he made hundreds of photos
in this manor and conducted other experiments in the darkroom.
I deliberately dodged all the rules, mixed the most insane products together,
committed heinous crimes against chemistry and photography.
Man Ray once said he set out to violate every rule in photography.
Throughout the twenties and thirties he continually pushed the frontiers of the photographic medium,
achieving works of rare beauty and strangeness.
He applied his talents to portraiture, fashion, and advertising.
Along the way, he opened new avenues for creative photography
and produced some of the most memorable and iconic pictures of his time.