Man Ray (1890–1976) was a innovator of the Dada crusade in the United States and France and a vital leading role of Surrealism. Man Ray found motivation at the Armory show of 1913, which introduced the works of Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Marcel Duchamp. Ray moved to Paris in 1921. He became to be well-known for his photographs of his creative and literary allies. He also established a flourishing career as a fashion photojournalist, by taking pictures for such publications as Vogue. His testing with photography comprised of experiencing how to create “camera-less” pictures, which he named Rayographs. These photographs were prepared by employing and influencing objects on pieces of photosensitive paper.
Ray’s prominent works from the 1924’s “Le Violon d’Ingres.”
Man Ray remained a fan of the portraits of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and completed a successions of pictures, motivated by Ingres’s languorous nudes, of the model Kiki in a turban. Placing the f-holes of a stringed instrument on the photographic print and then re-photographing the print, Man Ray transformed what was initially a standard nude. He also decided to add the name Le Violon d’Ingres, a French idiom that means “hobby.” The alteration of Kiki’s physique into a harmonious instrument with the simple accumulation of a little brushstrokes makes this a hilarious image, but then again her armless form is also alarming to consider. The photograph upholds a tautness among objectification and appreciation of the female body. I would interpret the photo as the women body can be great as to listening to music.
Arbitrating after Ray’s presence of this image in other photographic arrangements, he required to have considered Tears one of his most triumphant photographs. A cropped version of it with a single eye also appears as the first plate in a 1934 book of his photographs. The woman’s lamenting rising glimpse and mascara-encrusted lashes seem envisioned to raise curiosity at the source of her suffering. The face, however, belongs not to a actual female but to a fashion mannequin who cries tears of sparkling, rotund glass drops; the result is to aestheticize the feeling her tears would usually express. Man Ray finished this photograph in Paris about the time of his collapsing with his partner Lee Miller, and the woman’s false tears may narrate to that occasion in the artist’s life.
