Man Ray

Man Ray made photographs he did not want to be famous for, paintings and objects he did, and is the only American at the centre of both Dada and Surrealism. He was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia to Russian Jewish immigrants, a tailor and a seamstress; the family changed the name, and he spent his life declining to discuss his background, though the sewing and the fabric turn up throughout the work. In New York he met Marcel Duchamp in 1915 and the two of them effectively imported Dada. He moved to Paris in 1921 and stayed twenty years, supporting himself as a portrait and fashion photographer for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar - his sitters include Joyce, Stein, Proust on his deathbed, Schoenberg and half of Montparnasse - while insisting that painting was his real work. The photographic inventions came partly by accident: rayographs, made by putting objects directly on light-sensitive paper, and solarisation, developed with Lee Miller, who was his assistant and lover before becoming a major photographer herself. Le Violon d'Ingres, a nude with f-holes painted on her back, sold in 2022 for over twelve million dollars, the highest price ever paid for a photograph. He also published four of Eugene Atget's pictures in 1926, at the request of his assistant Berenice Abbott. He fled the German occupation in 1940 for Hollywood, returned to Paris in 1951, and is buried in Montparnasse under an epitaph reading unconcerned but not indifferent. He made the object Indestructible Object, a metronome with a photographed eye, and rebuilt it whenever it was destroyed. Lee Miller went on to photograph the liberation of Dachau for Vogue. He is buried in Montparnasse beside her successor Juliet Browner, his wife of thirty years.

• Lived: 1890 CE – 1976 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist