Man Ray renamed himself and invented the rayograph
Man Ray once argued that Dada could never take root in New York, because the whole city already was Dada. So in 1921 the tailor's son born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia moved to Paris, where cameraless prints he called rayographs, portraits of Joyce and Picasso, and experimental short films made his name among Dadaists and Surrealists.
South Philadelphia birth to Russian Jewish tailors Melach and Manya preceded Williamsburg years; in 1912 the family became Ray against antisemitism, and Manny shortened to Man. Tailoring scraps—irons, mannequins, pins—haunt collages even as he hid biography. Boys' High drafting, museum self-schooling, and Ferrer Centre anarchist classes beat a refused architecture scholarship; Armory Show cubism and Duchamp friendship pushed The Rope Dancer into motion studies.
Grantwood colony solos, New York Dada magazines, readymades such as The Gift (flatiron with tacks), and Société Anonyme co-founding with Duchamp and Dreier preceded the 1921 Paris move. Accidental photograms dazzled Tzara; Kiki de Montparnasse, Lee Miller (solarization partners), and later Ady Fidelin sat for iconic prints while Picasso, Joyce, and Stein faced his lens. Violon d'Ingres mapped f-holes onto Kiki's back; Object to Be Destroyed stuck an eye on a metronome.
His Cinéma Pur shorts ran from the two-minute Le Retour à la raison of 1923 to the 27-minute Les Mystères du Château de Dé of 1929; he also shot Léger's Ballet Mécanique, helped Duchamp film Anemic Cinema, and appeared playing chess with Duchamp in René Clair's Entr'acte. In 1925 he hung alongside Arp, Ernst, Miró and Picasso in the first Surrealist exhibition, at the Galerie Pierre, and his photographs of African sculpture from Paris collections, Noire et blanche among them, did more than anyone's to turn that fashion into a modernist camera style, according to the scholar Wendy Grossman.
War pushed him back to America in 1940. He settled in Hollywood for eleven years and concentrated on painting, producing the Shakespearean Equations canvases shown at the Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills in 1948. Within days of arriving he met Juliet Browner, a dancer trained under Martha Graham; they married in 1946 in a double ceremony with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. Ady Fidelin, his partner from late 1934, had stayed in France to look after her family, and until 2022 most accounts of his life left her out.
Source: Man Ray
