Ray, Man

US photographer, painter, and sculptor. He was active mainly in France and was associated with the Dada movement and then surrealism. One of his best-known sculptures is Gift (1921), a surrealist ready-made consisting of an iron on to which a row of nails has been glued.

Man Ray was born in Philadelphia, but lived mostly in Paris from 1921. He began as a painter and took up photography in 1915, the year he met the Dada artist Marcel Duchamp in New York. In 1922 he invented the rayograph, a black-and-white image obtained without a camera by placing objects on sensitized photographic paper and exposing them to light. He also used the technique of solarization (partly reversing the tones on a photograph). Among his photographs is Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), a nude woman viewed from the back so as to suggest a violin. His photographs include portraits of many artists and writers.

His autobiography, Self Portrait, apppeared in 1963.