“Crimes against Photography”: Man Ray and the Rayograph

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.