Man Ray born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 was an american photographer, painter and film maker. He was the only american to play a major role in the Dada and surrealist movements. The son of an artist and photographer, he grew up in New York City, where he studied architecture, engineering and art. Man Ray was a regular visitor to Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery where he earned an early appreciation for photography. In 1915 he met the French artist Marcel Duchamp who he learnt a lot from and together they collaborated on many inventions and formed the New York City group of Dada artist.
In 1921 Man Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the Parisian Dada and Surrealist circles of artists and writers. Inspired by the liberation promoted by these groups, he experimented with many media. His experiments with photography included rediscovering how to make “cameraless” pictures, or photograms, which he called rayographs. He made them by placing objects directly on light-sensitive paper, which he exposed to light and developed. A book was published in 1922 of Man Ray's rayographs called Les Champs delicieux which means " The delightful Fields". The book was published with an introduction by the influential Dada artist Tristan Tzara, who admired Man Ray's work for the enigmatic quality of his images. In 1929 he started to experiment with a technique called solarization, which renders part of a photographic image negative and part positive by exposing a print or negative to a flash of light during development. He was one of the first artists to use the process, known since the 1840s, for aesthetic purposes. He made a virtually complete photographic record of the celebrities of Parisian cultural life during the 1920s and ’30s. He also made films and in 1923 he used the rayograph technique for a motion picture film called Le Retour a la raison " Return to reason". Man Ray became internationally famous as a fashion and portrait photographer. In 1961 he was awarded the Gold Medal at the photography Biennale, Venice, and he received the German Photographic Society Cultural award in 1966. He died on Nov. 18, 1976. I have been doing some research into Man Ray's photography to see what techniques he uses to create abstract images.
