cover image Man Ray in Paris

Man Ray in Paris

Erin C. Garcia. Getty, $24.95 (128p) ISBN 978-1-60606-060-5

Born Emanuel Radnitzky, the American photographer Ray (1890%E2%80%931976) was both a leading figure of the Dada and Surrealist movements as well as a commercial success. This volume includes many of his photographs of the interwar period, including the famous one of Marcel Duchamp in drag as his female alter ego, "Rrose S%C3%A9levy" (a French pun for "Eros is life"). Particularly striking are the half-dozen portraits, including one of James Joyce in his late 30s and of an anxious (or is it pensive?) Sinclair Lewis at around the same age. The collection pays homage to both the whimsical, imaginative, unsettling energies of Ray's work, as well as his formal interests in geometry, symmetry, and contrasts (see his Untitled (Ostrich Egg with Stamp). Garcia (Photography as Fiction), former assistant curator of photography at the Getty, also highlights Ray's photographic innovations, including the "Rayograph" (placing objects on photographic paper and exposing the paper to light), but her analyses in general are a bit skimpy. For example, she notes the influence of Duchamp and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but never specifies the nature of that influence, nor does she sufficiently explain such technical terms as the "Cin%C3%A9-Sketch" or the "tri-color carbo process." Still, her brief introduction to Ray's Paris years, and his photographs themselves, will interest devotees of modernism and of 20th-century photography%E2%80%94and persuade them to read more deeply elsewhere. (May)