An active participant in Dadaism in New York and Surrealism in Paris, Man Ray perfected Christian Schad's photogram technique and invented the solarisation process with the photographer Lee Miller. Man Ray is the author of some of the most important photographs of the twentieth century. He revisited old processes and invented new ones to create experimental and poetic images. He also painted portraits of some of the greatest artists of his time: Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, André Breton, Constantin Brancusi, Alberto Giacometti..
Born Emmanuel Radnitsky, Man Ray was born in Philadelphia and spent his childhood in New York. Discovering the art of photographer Alfred Stieglitz's gallery and the Armory Show in 1913 was a revelation for him. During the Great War, he formed the New York Dada duo with Marcel Duchamp and took the nickname Man Ray. Those close to him described him as a playful, playful, insatiable tinkerer. On his return to France in 1921, Man Ray came into contact with the Surrealists and settled in Montparnasse. He made his living as a photographer and became the portraitist of the avant-garde.
Man Ray was a jack-of-all-trades. In the 1920s, he made ready-mades but also developed a special relationship with photography. He began a number of experiments (collages, double exposure, etc.). In 1921, Man Ray created his first rayograms, using the old photogram technique. Without using a camera, he obtained negative views of objects placed on a photosensitive plate and exposed to light. The idea was to reinterpret everyday objects in a different way, to reveal their poetic or mysterious qualities.
Man Ray had several loves: Kiki de Montparnasse, the famous model of the bohemian painters who posed for Violon d'Ingres (1924), and Lee Miller, his muse and photographer, who assisted him in his aesthetic experiments. Together, they invented the solarisation process, which produced colour-reversed images by exposing developing negatives to very strong light. Ady Fidelin, a dancer, came into his life in the 1930s.