Man Ray: Liberating Photography

Man Ray (1890-1976) was a man both ahead of and ahead of his time. With his conceptual approach and innovative techniques, he liberated photography from previous limitations and opened the doors to new ways of thinking about the medium.

A close friend of Marcel Duchamp and André Breton, he was one of the few photographers counted among the Dadaists and Surrealists. He also worked as a fashion photographer, first for Vogue and later for Harper's Bazaar and Vanity Fair. Known as the creator of Ingres' Violin - a 1924 photograph that broke records when it sold for $12.4 million in 2022 - Man Ray remains an influential figure in the world of art, fashion and pop culture, and many other artists refer to his work.

The coffee table book "Man Ray: Liberating Photography" was published in conjunction with an exhibition at Photo Elysée and in the centennial year of the publication of André Breton's Surrealist Manifesto. The photo book presents more than 150 portraits of Man Ray, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s. It includes portraits of leading figures of the Paris art scene, including Marcel Duchamp, Robert Delaunay, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, as well as a selection of his fashion work. An innovator of photographic techniques and compositional forms, Man Ray found the studio portrait - whether it was the artists and writers with whom he maintained long-standing friendships or the objects and sculptures he collected - the playground in which he could express the visual wit and experimentation for which he is known.

Specifications
Title: Man Ray: Liberating Photography
Author: Nathalie Herschdorfer
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Size: 240 x 196 x 22 mm
Size: 244 pages
Weight: 1 kg
Language: English
Material: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780500028117