Photographs by Man Ray: 105 Works, 1920-1934 by Man Ray

Man Ray was a superbly inventive photographer able to ignore the borders bewtween art & commercial photography. Originally published in 1934 as “Photographs by Man Ray 1920 Paris 1934,” this collection is an excellent look at his photo work during his most adventurous years. The book is divided into five sections: general subjects; the female figure; women’s faces; celebrity portraits; rayographs.

Man Ray’s female figures are an offbeat take on the male gaze in which the processes are as sexy as the women. Along with his female faces, they demonstrate why Man Ray was much in demand by fashionable magazines. The “celebrity” portraits are of his fellow male artists & writers, with the exception of Gertrude Stein – who can hardly be glamorized anyway. The rayographs were created by placing objects directly on film, but the experimental nature of Man Ray’s art is seen throughout this inexpensive book from Dover Publications. Picasso, Eluard, Breton, Tzara & Rrose Selavy a.k.a. Marcel Duchamp contributed texts. Highly recommended.

Man Ray: Women by Valerio Deho and Man Ray

As with so many Dover books, 105 Works is a great bargain

Man Ray (Taschen Icons) by Taschen

This small book is part of a vague series called Icons by Taschen. They are a dim reflection on some of their larger works.

This book is definitely not for beginners, not meant to be an introduction to Man Ray. However, it has some value for people familiar with Man Ray, Andre Breton and/or Dada. Think of it as material for art history or food for thought about the time.

Do yourself a favor and don’t try to learn about Man Ray from this book or any of the enthusiastic or overblown “reviews” of it. Start with something more comprehensive.

If and when you already know about Man Ray and where he fits, get this book and carry it around when you want to feed your head a little. It is nicely done and fills that need very well.

For those unfamiliar with Man Ray, he is not primarily known as a photographer and never intended to be. It is probably the ease of publishing his photographs that has distracted people to thinking of him this way. Don’t miss the rest of his work, especially his writing. Read his autobiography and use his photographs as a “program” to identify the players, perhaps.

Man Ray: Photography and Its Double by Alain Sayag and Emmanuelle De I’Ecotais

The book was originally published to coincide with a major exhibition of Man Ray’s photography at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris in April through June 1998. It is composed of several essays about Man Ray and his work as well as a large selection of his best photographs. It very much resembles an exhaustive 260-page catalogue of the exhibit. Some of the essays are much better than others, but they do give some interesting insights into Man Ray and his methods of working.
I was surprised to learn about Ray’s “modus operandi.” In fact I was so surprised that I immediately ordered a copy of his autobiography “Self-Portrait” in order to read the photographer’s own descriptions of his work and thinking. A self-taught photographer Man Ray didn’t follow the common photographic practices of his era and in many ways that was his genius. Most of the photographs included in this book were contact prints that Man Ray made himself. He then used markers or folded the contact proof to show his printer where and how to crop the image. He seldom made his own final prints justifying that fact by saying he was too busy to do everything himself.
Some of the techniques he employed are explained as being necessary to make the grain of the final photographs show up and soften the image. Some of the final cropping of the pictures use only a small portion of the entire image. That’s fine, but it makes the viewer wonder if the photographer only discovered the essence of the final image long after the picture was taken? Using only a tiny portion of the total photograph fits in fine with the over-all philosophy of Surrealism so the photographer may not have been telling “little white lies” like he sometimes did in order to keep his secrets. One advantage of seeing the total negative, along with the cropping instructions of so many of his works gives the viewer a good insight into the workings of a pioneer photographer’s vision.
This book is excellent for a person who already knows something about photographic techniques and processes as well as Man Ray. There are others that would probably be more interesting for the reader and viewer unacquainted with Man Ray’s work. Aperture’s “Masters of Photography Series” includes “Man Ray” with an Essay by Jed Perl and is one such book. It provides a shorter, easier-to-read introduction to the work of Emmanuel Ranitzsky (Man Ray’s birth name) and samples of a wider selection of his photographic work. He is sometimes called the “Father of Fetish Photography” for good reason. He is also a fascinating man, which doesn’t come out in this book or the Aperture volume. A better biographical portrait of the man can be found in sections of “Lee Miller: A Life” by Carolyn Burke.

Aperture Masters of Photography: Man Ray by Man Ray

Aperture’s “Master of Photography” collections are economical, well put together samplers of some of this century’s best known photographers, and are a good starting point for those relatively unfamiliar with an artist’s work. The emphasis is on providing a representative image from all stages in the photographer’s career (a long, diverse one in the case of Man Ray)so depth in the era the photographer did his most important work is sacrificed to chronological breadth.

The reproductions are good, but not exceptional. Some of the images lacked the glow – the sense of captured light – seen in higher-end reproductions of the images. This slight deadening of the images was most apparent in Man Ray’s wonderful solarized photos – images with a which when reproduced well seem to be lit from within.

Art and photography books are perhaps the least suited for e-commerce as we know it today. Some of my favorite images were not in the Aperture books, and I would have been able to see this before buying by thumbing through the book at a traditional bookstore. Hopefully, as technology advances, Amazon will allow us to “thumb through” these books of images on-line, by being able to view all the images electronically before buying.

All in all, this Aperture series is a good, inexpensive place to get started for someone who would like to see representative images of an artist with whom he or she is unfamiliar. They are not by any means comprehensive works, nor do they have the most beautiful reproductions of some of the mostmemorable images of this century. These books are, however, much less expensive than museum catalogs, have intelligent introductory essays, and are printed passably – they serve a valuable purpose in making the work of these photographers more accessible, and encouraging further exploration into an artist’s work.

Man Ray: American Artist by Neil Baldwin

I bought this book expecting it to be a basic guide on Man Ray’s work. The problem is it happens to be a little too basic. You can’t find Man Ray’s most expressive work, except for “Tears” (only on the cover), “Le Violin d’Ingres”, “Mask of Woman”, “Le Priere” and a few Rayographs. It seems to be a biographic record instead of an art book, although it doesn’t blur the genius of Man Ray’s photographs.

“… MAN RAY 0 American A P t 1 S t aromatic mixtures …”

Self Portrait: Man Ray by Man Ray, Juliet Man Ray, and Merry A. Foresta

Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890. He changed his name early in his career. Man Ray always considered himself primarily a painter. His photography was just a way of earning money so he could afford to paint. He grew up in New York City and was a regular visitor the “291″ and “An American Place” the modern art and photography galleries of Alfred Stieglitz. In fact, he was around Stieglitz enough to sometimes get a “bit” bored with his “long-winded” lecturing about Photography’s important place in the Art World. Man Ray did become acquainted with many styles of modern art and photography from Stieglitz and they remained life-long friends.
It’s always been one of my theories that the best place to find out about a person is by reading his own words in that person’s autobiography. That theory holds doubly true with the autobiography of Man Ray. I’d read a lot about Man Ray in other biographies and books about Dadaism, Surrealism and the history of photography. But it wasn’t until I read this book that I felt like I had any kind of understanding of the man, his work and his thoughts. The very concept of Dadaism had always seemed mysterious to me until Man Ray discussed it in a couple of places in his Self Portrait. He wrote “Dada has accomplished its purpose of mocking the artistic and political futility of the day, offsetting it with irrationality and the destruction of all accepted values. It was as if the Dadaists were proposing to take over the affairs of this world, implying that they could not have made a worse mess than had the accredited leaders.”
“What Dada had accomplished was purely negative; its poems and paintings were illogical, irreverent and irrelevant.” “Dada did not die; it was simply transformed” into a new movement “Surrealism, a word taken from the writings of the dead poet Apollinaire… that was composed of all the original members of the Dada group…”
There were some glaring omissions in this book. While his mistress Kiki was given lots of space and described in a chapter entitled “The True Story of Kiki of Montparnasse,” Lee Miller was barely mentioned in the book. Other than a sentence where he mentioned she was one of his darkroom assistants and including her name as the model in a couple of the photographs reproduced in the book, their torrid several year affair wasn’t mentioned. It was almost as if Man Ray hadn’t forgiven his tall, blond mistress, favorite model, fellow photographer and beautiful American Muse for abandoning him. It was as if writing about their relationship was too painful to share with the public.
Man Ray spent a lot of time describing in detail some of his experimental films. Since those films fully achieved the Dada goal of being totally illogical, irreverent and irrelevant as well as boring, even his descriptions of his film work seemed “much ado about nothing.”
There were lots of surprises and insights in this autobiography of an ex-patriot American. One of my favorite sections involved the surrender of France to the Nazi. Paris then became an “open city.” Man Ray and one of his mistresses had tried to escape but didn’t succeed and had to return to Paris. Unlike the generally accepted view of the Nazi as absolute barbarians, Man Ray describes their taking over of Paris and occupied France as a genuine attempt to befriend the newly conquered citizens of French. They seemed mostly busy organizing and reorganizing all levels of French government: something that was probably much needed and long overdue?
Finally, before the Nazi became absolute enemies of the average French citizen, Man Ray along with most of his artist friends were able to leave the country for the USA.
He escaped at the same time as his friend Salvador Dali and his wife. Man Ray had it easier because he was an American citizen and the United States was still a neutral nation at the time. When he returned to France after WW II ended he was amazed to discover his home in the country and most of his artwork had survived the war. Picasso and some of his other fellow artists had also survived the occupation safely. While all of Paris had been mined with explosives so that the Germans could destroy the entire city with the push of a button, the German commander of Paris had decided to ignore Hitler’s last minute orders to burn the city as the German army retreated from the advancing allies and Paris was spared total destruction. For an American who had been seduced by France, Man Ray was always grateful that Paris was spared by an enlightened German General. Ray eventually moved back to his adopted country and died there. He is buried in his beloved Paris.
The book is well worth reading. Man Ray was a truly independent thinker as well as a genuine eccentric and contrarian. He always claimed that Photography was not a full-fledged art form but he alternated between his own photography explorations and his true love, painting. As the reader will quickly learn, Man Ray could also write. He was happy when he “had everything again, a woman, a studio, a car.”

Man Ray: 1890-1976 (Photobook) by Katherine Ware and Emmanuelle De L’Ecotais

Although many people think of Man Ray only as a photographer, his artistic work began with training in drawing. His approach to photography was always that of a painter, seeing photography as a way to create images with light as well as with the hand. He made two major innovations in technique, being the first to learn to expose images on photographic paper to capture their outline (rayographs) and to control the solarization process (where a partial reversal of values occurs in a photograph, accompanied by a characteristic edge) to create a consistent halo appearance. He also developed many ways to affect the surface appearance of the objects he photographed to make them more abstract. Deeply interested in Dadaism and Surrealism (although never formally joining either movement), Man Ray also captured witty titles and everyday objects in his photography to give additional depth to the message of his work. You will find many of his well-known portraits of famous artists in this volume.

Before saying more about this outstanding volume, let me caution you (as the cover art surely must) that Man Ray often created images of nude women. If such things offend you, this volume will not be appropriate for you.

The essays in this volume as reproduced in English, German, and French. I found them very helpful for providing technical background on the influences on and methods used in Man Ray’s work. His approach was very Edison-like in its many unsuccessful experiments and accidents that led to important breakthroughs. A random mouse helped him learn how to do solarization.

It is not surprising that Marcel Duchamp and he became instant friends. Their perspectives on art have many points in common.

Born as Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, he had moved to New York by age 7, and became exposed there to many important artistic influences. These included the Stieglitz gallery, the Armory Show in 1913, and leading artists in New York. He started as a photographer in 1914 just before meeting Marcel Duchamp. His primary years of productivity were spent in Paris, from which he was driven by the Nazi invasion in 1940. His return to the United States was less than a total joy, and he resided again in Paris after 1951.

I believe that this volume is as much a delight for the mind as it is for the eye. Subtle differences in processing of similar images create enormously changed reactions in the viewer. You then move forward to study the reason for your changed perspective and find it in a small detail . . . like a slightly lifted eyebrow. Miror images in positive and negative reproduced side by side on facing pages create a similar reaction.

Here are my favorites from these outstanding reproductions of Man Ray’s best work:

Integration of Shadows 1919

Untitled 1922

La violin d’Ingres 1924

Retour a la raison 1923

Meret Oppenheim 1932

“Beauty in ultra violet” c. 1931

Erotique voilee [Meret Oppenheim] 1933

Le Priere c. 1930

Anatomia 1929

Nusch and Sonia 1935

Untitled 1931

Untitled [hair] 1931

Lee Miller c. 1930

Objet mathematique 1934-36

Les Arums 1039

Untitled [Dancer] c. 1935

Enough Rope 1944

Rayograph 1925

Rayograph 1930

Champs delicieux 1922

Marcel Duchamp 1916

Constantin Brancusi 1933

Max Ernst c. 1934

Andre Breton c. 1930

Marcel Duchamp 1921

Joan Miro c. 1930

Pablo Picasso 1932

If you enjoy the the ultimate in photographic creativity, this is the book for you!

After you finish this work, I suggest that you take these insights and begin to create some art of your own. Consider creating composite images by including your own collages with natural objects and photographing them, for example. You can even include your own poems as adjoining commentaries.

Expand your mind and your grasp by taking advantage of all the resources at your disposal!

Man Ray, 1890-1976 by Man Ray

Some photograhers see a pose and snap it as a statue. Man Ray envisoned etheral impressions through his works. I discovered this beautiful book of 300 duotone photos at a quaint little shoppe by the University. Don’t you just love to happen upon old books unmasking new treasures? Me too. And I will definately be seeking out more regarding Man Ray’s career as a commercial artist, photographer, and as a colleague of Marcel Duchamp and the New York Dadaists.

These poses, these works of art, through Ray’s impeccably searching eyes, have a quality of hallowedness. An American, he had moved to Paris in 1921 and quickly became one of the most celebrated experimentalists of his era. Fascinatingly, he used a simple yet efective innovation of solaraization, which bestowed a ghostly silver aura upon his posers. Just truly remarkable!

Classic images of Salvador Dali, Breton, Yves Tanguy, Jean Cocteau, and even Gertrude Stein are among this embodiment. Also his creative assembled objects and a selection of fashion spreads for Vanity Fair, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar.

A truly gorgeous photograpy book to be lost in.

Man Ray (Midsize) by Katherine Ware, Emmanuelle De L’Ecotais, and Manfred Heiting

There are many many Man Ray collections available now and choosing the best collection is fairly difficult unless you can preview each of them. I’ve seen many, but this is the first collection I felt compelled to purchase for a number of reasons.

First, the quality of the reproductions are uniformly excellent. The book is a nice size for this sort of thing. The photographs are large and the images are detailed. Taschen always does a great job with this sort of thing.

Second, the selections present a nice spectrum of Ray’s work. It begins with a generous selection of his figure studies before moving on to some fashion work, a few of his famous “Rayographs”, and some portraits. If you have a particular area of interest, you may prefer a more specific collection. For instance, if you are interested in his portraits of surrealists and dadaists, there are collections of those. Similarly, if you’re a fan of his figure studies, there are plenty of books that cover those images exclusively. What this Taschen edition does the best is represent all of his styles in one easily accessibly volume.

Finally, the text is engaging and informative. Trilingual essays begin each section by framing the work historically as well as aesthetically. Anytime you read a trilingual book, it’s always a gamble on readability. Fortunately for all you fellow English speakers, English is the largest and most prominent on the page.

There is also a chronology thrown in for good measure. Little features such as this really set this collection apart from the others. The combination of beautiful, large reproductions, informative text, and a comprehensive collection of images make this a great choice for anyone interested in Man Ray or surrealist art in general.

Man Ray’s Montparnasse by Herbert R. Lottman

There are a few almost legendary places whose draw reaches across the centuries of time and space and makes people wish that they could hop into a time-machine and go for a vacation or visit. For me, one of those fabled eras is Montparnasse Paris at the turn of twentieth-century. I’ve always thought of this location at this historical period as the “Paris Camelot of Art” and for me its draw is stronger than say the “Camelot of King Arthur.”
Lottman has done a marvelous job of combining the many important artists and art movements that mark this time and place into a single readable, but informative book. It makes a nice companion to “KiKi’s Paris: Artist and Lovers 1900-1930″ (see my review). Unlike that book, which is like a huge family album of photographs of the people who passed through the area at that time in history, this book delves deeper into the personalities that formed the knights of the “rustic wine barrels” serving as the round tables of the “passage de l’Opera” in 1919.
The author picked Man Ray as his connection to all the people described in the book because the gregarious American visitor did what few of the other personalities described could do. He was able to get along with the various stratum of society that inhabited Montparnasse at the time. His camera opened the doors of the Dadaists as well as the mansion gates of high society and the rich aristocrats. Once his reputation with a camera was established, every important visitor to the area wanted to have their portrait made by the American living in Paris. Since he also did a lot of assignments for many of the most important news and fashion magazines of the era, his reputation and location was soon known worldwide. Much to his disgust, but to the benefit of his wallet, having him take your portrait became a status symbol. Despite this economic success he was still able to remain a part of the anti-society, anti-everything Dada movement.
People liked Man Ray and they liked having their pictures taken too. Everyone it seemed liked to have him take his or her picture. May Ray of course, didn’t consider photography an art and considered himself to be primarily a serious painter.
The strength of this book is how the author manages to paint so many interesting biographical portraits and yet have them all interact in the geographic jumble that was Montparnasse. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this book.

Man Ray: Photographs, Paintings, Objects (Schirmer’s Visual Library) by Man Ray and Janus

THE premier artist from the 1920′s till his death. His art was not limited to photography, it included, painting and objects. His black and white photographs didn’t appeal to middle America, they were to raw, edgy and darkly fascinating. Maybe I’m biased due to my love of black and white photography which is “not quite sane” or boarders on the visceral. Frida Kahlo was another artist whose work can bring out those same feelings. Forget Ansel Adams, open your mind and look at a true artist.

Marcel Duchamp/Man Ray: 50 Years Of Alchemy by Chrissie Iles, Marcel Duchamp, Sean Kelly, and Man Ray

My son loved this book. The delivery was quick & the book exactly as described.

“… war Man Ray den meisten Fotografen weit voraus, denen er entgegenhielt: ‘Ich bin …”