By Cristina Ruiz

Man Ray (August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976), born

Emmanuel Radnitzky, was an American artist who spent most of
his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to both the Dada
and Surrealist movements.
 He considered himself a painter
above all. He was also a renowned
fashion and portrait photographer.
He is noted for his photograms,
which he renamed "rayographs".
 Man Ray moved to Brooklyn with his family at the age
of seven. Receives a scholarship to study architecture but
rejects the idea, as well as an academic education.

In New York he worked as an engraver and in an

advertising agency, while attending night classes at the
National Academy of Design.
His first solo exhibition took place at
the Daniel Gallery in New York in
1915. He founded, along with Marcel
Duchamp and Francis Picabia, the
New York Dada.
 His early works are the experimental Rayographs in1921,
photographic images taken without a camera (abstract
images obtained with exhibits on a light-sensitive paper and
then revealed). He also does portraits. In fact, he becomes
portrait photographer of cultural personalities.
 In the thirties he made series of solarization,
photographic negatives exposed to light, and
continued to paint in a surrealist style, and published
several volumes of photographs and rayographs.
In the late twenties begins to
make avant-garde films like
Starfish (1927).
In 1936 his work is
represented in the exhibition
Fantastic Art, Dada and
Surrealism at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York.

In 1940, fleeing the Nazi

occupation of Paris, he
settled in Hollywood and
New York, returning to
France in 1951.
In 1963 he published his autobiography before he
died. The Metropolitan Museum in New York
devoted a retrospective of his photographic work
(1973).

He died on November 18, 1976, in Paris. He is

buried in Montparnasse Cemetery.