Man Ray Research Paper

Man Ray, born as Emmanuel Rudnitzky, was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia. They moved to Brooklyn when Ray was a young child. His family changed their surname to Ray and he went by the nickname Manny, which turned into Man and slowly led to his use of the pseudonym Man Ray.
Even at a young age, Ray showed great artistic ability. He frequently visited Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291 where he was exposed to art trends and developed an appreciation for photography. In 1915, Man Ray met Marcel Duchamp, a French artist, and together they formed the New York group of Dada artists. Dadaism was an artistic and literary movement that encouraged spontaneity. He was originally inspired by and cubism and expressionism, but after meeting Duchamp, …show more content…
He was inspired by the liberation that was promoted by these groups and he experimented with photography. One of his experiments included making “cameraless” pictures called photograms, which he called rayographs. To make these, he placed objects directly on light sensitive paper, which he then exposed to light and developed. In 1922 a book of his collected rayographs, Les Champs délicieux (“The Delightful Fields”), was published. In 1929, Man Ray and his lover, Lee Miller also experimented with a technique called solarization, which makes part of the image negative and part of it positive by exposing the print of negative to a flash of light during …show more content…
He was able to return to Paris in 1951 and began to explore different artistic media. Ray focused on painting and sculpting. He also began to write his memoir, which took over a decade to complete. His autobiography, Self-Portrait, was finally published in 1963. In his final years, Ray continued to exhibit his art in New York, London, Paris, and other cities before his death. He died in his studio in Paris at 86 years old. His work can still be found on display in many museums around the world and is remembered for his artistic humor and originality. He played a major role in the Dada and Surrealist movements and ultimately made a significant contribution to the evaluation of photography as an art

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