Man Ray was a trickster. Like many of his Dadaist and Surrealist friends, he regarded representing, reproducing and recording reality as old-fashioned, prosaic, even servile. The fun--and there is nothing if not fun in Man Ray's work--lay in fragmenting, distorting, manipulating, questioning, subverting, blurring and playing with the real world (and the viewer's perceptions of it). Through his use (and in some cases, possible creation) of a wide range of avant-garde techniques--including solarization, rayographs and superimposition--he proved that photography need not concern itself with literal representation, but can evoke a more mysterious world. "I'm not a photographer of nature, but of my own imagination," claimed Man Ray, who was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890 and died in Paris 86 years later.
Though the creative energy of Man Ray's experimental photographs is indisputable, it is his straightforward--dare I say classic?--works that are the most compelling, especially his prints of the female nude. Man Ray never depicted the body as a temple; it could therefore never be defiled, only enjoyed. Thus the lush pleasure of his photos of Lee Miller's breasts (circa 1930), or of his stout and lovely mistress Kiki in 1923. (Though even here the reality principle was apparently tampered with: Kiki was embarrassed by her lack of pubic hair, so Man Ray gallantly sketched some in on the photographic plate.) Classic, too, is the utilitarian beauty of an eggbeater titled, simply, "Woman" (1920; previous title: "Man") and the austerely luminous portraits of the Surrealist painter Yves Tanguy (1936).
