Ray, Man

Published in connection with an exhibition at Photo Elysée and in the centenary year of the publication of André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, this book presents over 150 of Man Ray’s portraits, primarily from the 1920s and 30s. It includes portraits of the leading lights of the Paris art scene, among them Marcel Duchamp, Robert Delaunay, Georges Braque, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso, as well as a selection of his fashion work. As an innovator of photographic techniques and compositional form, Man Ray found the studio portrait – be it of the artists and writers with whom he had longstanding friendships, or of the objects and sculptures he collected – to be the playground in which he could express the visual wit and experimentation for which he is renowned.