Liberating Photography

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky, 1890-1976) was a man ahead of his time. With his conceptual approach and innovative techniques, he freed photography from its previous constraints and opened the way to new ways of thinking about the medium.

A close friend of Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, he is one of the few photographers to be mentioned among the Dadaist and Surrealist artists. He also worked as a fashion photographer, first for Vogue, then for Harper’s Bazaar and Vanity Fair. Recognised as the creator of Violon d’Ingres – a 1924 photograph that broke records when it sold for $12.4 million in 2022 – Man Ray remains an influential figure in the world of art, fashion and pop culture, and many other artists refer to his work.

Published as part of an exhibition at Photo Elysée and to mark the centenary of the publication of André Breton’s Manifeste du Surréalisme, this book presents over 150 portraits by Man Ray, mainly from the 1920s and 1930s. It includes portraits of key figures in the Paris art scene, including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Delaunay, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, as well as a selection of his work on fashion. An innovator in photographic technique and compositional form, Man Ray found studio portraiture – whether of artists and writers with whom he enjoyed a longstanding friendship, or of objects and sculptures he collected – the playground that allowed him to express the visual wit and experimentation for which he was renowned.