I Worked with Man Ray

Abstract

In this chapter the author provides a self-effacing account of her time with Man Ray. Man Ray bought his first camera in order to reproduce his cubist paintings. That was in Paris in 1919. He became enslaved by the djinn in the black box, which in a second achieved the same effect as all his years of skilled draughtsmanship. Man Ray, American born, is by nature neat, accurate, critical and ingenious. He not only studies his mistakes to improve his technique, but has sometimes contrived to put his errors to work for him. Man Ray has been called the photographers’ photographer and the poets’. His friends and collaborators in Paris, in the twenty years after the last war, included all the prominent personalities in Modern Art activity - Cubism, Dadaism, and Surrealism. Picasso used his cameras and understood more; Man Ray made drawings for Paul Eluard to make into poems; Max Ernst made sculpture with gardening tools.