Man Ray

Man Ray, pseudonym of Emmanuel Radnitsky, was a painter, photographer and filmmaker, born August 27, 1890 in Philadelphia (United States) and died November 18, 1976 in

Paris, France). A leading figure of Dadaism in New York, and of surrealism in Paris (from 1921), Man Ray perfected the photogram technique and invented, alongside photographer Lee Miller, the so-called solarization process. In Montparnasse, for twenty years, Man Ray revolutionized photographic art. The great artists of his time posed for him, such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau. He shared his discovery of the work of Eugène Atget with the surrealists and his assistant Berenice Abbott. Refusing any hierarchy between painting and photography, he considered the camera and the brush as instruments equivalent to what a typewriter is for a writer.