RAY, MAN

born Aug. 27, 1890, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S. died Nov. 18, 1976, Paris, France original name Emanuel Rabinovitch American photographer, painter, and filmmaker of the Dada and Surrealist movements, important for his numerous technical innovations in various media. The son of an artist and photographer, Ray grew up in New York City, where he studied architecture, engineering, and art and became a painter. In 1915 Ray met the French artist Marcel Duchamp, and together they collaborated on many inventions and formed the New York group of Dada. Like Duchamp, Ray began to produce ready-mades, commercially manufactured objects that he designated as works of art. Among his best-known ready-mades is Le Cadeau (1921; The Gift), a flatiron with a row of tacks glued to the bottom. In 1921 Ray moved to Paris and became associated with the group of Surrealist artists and writers headed by Andr Breton. To finance his painting Ray took up photography. He experimented with the medium endlessly, rediscovering how to make cameraless pictures, or photograms, which he called rayographs. He made them by placing flat and three-dimensional objects of various opacities on light-sensitive paper, which he exposed to light and developed. In 1922 a book of his collected rayographs, Les Champs dlicieux (The Delightful Fields), was published. He also rediscovered in 1929 the technique called solarization, which renders part of the photographic image negative and part positive by exposing a print or negative to a flash of light during development. Ray was the first to use the process (known since the 1840s) for aesthetic purposes. Ray turned to fashion and portrait photography and made a virtually complete record of the celebrities of Parisian cultural life during the 1920s and '30s. His fame soon became so great that his major paintings, such as Observatory TimeThe Lovers (193234), were ignored. Even in his portrait photographs, however, he continued to experiment: he gave one sitter three pairs of eyes, and in Violon d'Ingres (1924) he photographically superimposed f-shaped holes onto the photograph of the back of a female nude so that the woman resembled a violin. Meanwhile he continued to produce ready-mades. One, a metronome with a photograph of an eye fixed to the pendulum, was called Object to be Destroyed (1923)which it was by anti-Dada rioters in 1957. He also made the films Anemic Cinema (1924; in collaboration with Duchamp) and L'toile de mer (192829; Star of the Sea). In another short film, Le Retour la raison (1923; The Return to Reason), he applied the rayograph technique to motion-picture film, making patterns with salt, pepper, tacks, and pins. In 1940 Ray escaped the German occupation of Paris by moving to Los Angeles. Returning to Paris in 1946, he continued to paint and experiment until his death.