Man Ray

 Man Ray was an American born French photographer who was interested in developing his own ideas as well as being best known for his surreal sculptures. After spending over 35 years as a painter he decided to create a separate section of his life where he experimented with photography and used black and white film, one of the first people to use this medium of work and subsequently wanted to call his work ‘Rayograms’ however the name didn’t take off.

His first major work was a patch work image, neither a painting or photograph which was influenced by Picasso before he met with Marcele DuChamp and challenged ‘What Is Art’. Ray got in to photography in 1920 when he realised that he didn’t like the photos that other people took for him so he went on to buy a camera and took photographs for DuChamp, of both him and his work. From there he created ironic titles for him images as well as having his work printed in magazines across America and France.

When he first exhibited his work, people weren’t interested in how they were however people were amazed by his photograms, which were created by placing objects on to photographic paper and exposing it to light within a dark room and this became his speciality within art. He learned to control the contrast and tones within the picture and this was exhibited in many magazines including the quote “You have liberated painting people said.”

He later gave up painting to focus on his photograms which took the form of what he imagined in his mind and all of this took place within a hotel room where he had basic equipment but everyone wanted to use him as a photographer, including artists, friends and family and later went on to rent a studio and bought darkroom equipment to use within it. Vogue later bought his portraits and also commissioned him to photograph celebrities and was seen as the photographer for rich people in France and America, which included interior shots and landscapes.

The core of his portrait images included him setting up the lighting before the client arrived and asked them neither to smile or have their eyes open until he took the picture and sometimes had them hold an object to distract them, all of which was photographed in front of a plain or checkerboard background. He also liked to play with shadows setting up his camera 3 metres away from the subject and did not take more than 12 images per subject and composed and cropped the images carefully. He also added pencil marks on to the images to improve them as he understood what makes a good shot is the use of light and contrast. His images showed symmetry, which he showed a lot of within his images.

He also solarised his images which was by accident the first time as he exposed his images to light during their development, exaggerating the contrast dark and light and making the images appear mysterious however, it as a risky technique to use due to the chances of ruining the film.

There are strong lines within all of Ray’s photos as well as sophisticated lighting and showed this by going against the trend by photographing realism, being experimental with abstract while everyone else was photographing pretty things such as landscapes while he as pushing the boundaries of photography.