Man Ray Books

When American-born Surrealist Man Ray died in 1976, he left behind thousands of photo negatives, mostly portraits taken in his studio after his arrival in Paris in 1921. The Centre Georges Pompidou, which has owned them since the mid-1990s, has duly catalogued the collection of negatives and is now in a position to bring out what is an encyclopedic publication in the best sense of the term. It attests both to Man Ray s ability as a portrait photographer and to the quality of his archive as a monument to cultural history. The catalog features 500 portraits, each of which is explained in a short commentary. Since Man Ray's clientele was made up of members of Dadaist and Surrealist circles, of artists and painters, of writers and US emigrants of the Lost Generation, of aristocrats, and paragons of the worlds of fashion and theater, the book is at the same time a marvelous Who's Who and an indispensable reference work for a broad range of different historians and scholars of the 20th century.

"Dada is artistic free-thinking." — Breton. Man Ray (1890–1976), an American photographer, painter, designer, sculptor, and filmmaker, arrived in Paris in 1921, where he was inspired by the irrationality of Dada and the surreal vision of Surrealism. He created striking images that transform our perceptions of reality. This large-format volume features a rich selection of his works from the 1920s and 30s, reproduced on coated stock to preserve their dramatic impact. Ray's innovative techniques included over and underexposure, shooting through fabrics, superimposing images, and focusing on minute details. He welcomed the artificiality and strangeness that resulted from breaking conventional presentation modes. The photographs are organized into five categories: general subjects (still lifes, landscapes, etc.), female figures (mainly nudes), women's faces (including Gertrude Stein), celebrity portraits (Ray, Dalí, Picasso, and others), and rayographs, which are "cameraless" compositions. The edition also includes texts by Eluard, Breton, and Tzara in French with English translations, along with an introduction by Ray. Today, Ray's photographs command high prices, making this affordable Dover edition an invaluable resource for photographers, artists, and students to explore these iconic masterpieces that challenge conventional aesthetics.

“I do not photograph nature, I photograph my fantasy,” Man Ray proclaimed, and he found in the camera's eye and in light's magical chemistry the mechanisms for dreaming. Schooled as a painter and designer in New York, Man Ray turned to photography after discovering the 291 Gallery and its charismatic founder, Alfred Stieglitz. As a young expatriate in Paris during the twenties and thirties, Man Ray embraced Surrealism and Dadaism, creeds that emphasized chance effects, disjunction and surprise. Tireless experimentation with technique led him to employ solarization, grain enlargement, mixed media and cameraless prints (photograms)--which he called “Rayographs”. These successful manipulations for which he was dubbed “the poet of the darkroom” by Jean Cocteau, were a major contribution to twentieth-century photography. Man Ray presents 43 of the greatest images from the artist's career. The essay by Jed Perl describes the influences on Man Ray's career and his enduring contribution to photography.

Man Ray found the surreal in the commonplace, particularly in the female form, and this has made his photography some of the world's most accessible and his ubiquitous La Violin d'Ingres creates a cello from a woman's torso with the addition of curliqued vents inked on her sides; his classic image of shining cinematic tears glistening on a powdered cheek has been tucked into mirror frames all over the world. This collection of more than 130 pictures dated between 1920 and 1950 covers not only Ray's work as one of the world's leading avant-garde artists--he was a tireless experimenter who participated in the Cubist, Dadaist and Surrealist art movements--but also his commercial work. It includes fashion photography and advertising images; portraits of many artists, including Marcel Proust, Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton; and a portfolio of 26 Femmes. Art dealer Giorgio Marconi, who met May Ray in 1966 in Milan, contributes an insightful interview.

Masterful collection of 60 works by a supreme artist with an unerring ability to capture his subject’s personality on film. Revealing portraits of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and many other luminaries. New English translations of Introduction and captions.

In this autobiography, May Ray - painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer - relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawing classes in a Brooklyn high school, to the glamorous and heady days of Paris in the 1940s and beyond.

"A semi-autobiographical middle-grade graphic novel about a Canadian-Chinese boy who feels invisible at home and in school but longs to stand out"--