Response

Writing Response: Man Ray film

A  Documentary Film by Jean-Paul Fargier 1998 covers photographer Man Ray’s life and art. I was pleased to learn more about Man Ray, who I know best from his fashion photography. Now I have learned that he used fashion” to further his art”, that he started as a painter, bought a camera to capture his art and finally found photography and radiography. He was also a poet and filmmaker. He used the same principal in his photography as in his art work, the aim was to show rather an idea than an object and rather a dream than an idea.

Man ray was American, who spend half of his life living in France.  After moving to Paris his first exhibition did not succeed as he expected. Radiography gave Man Ray the ability to paint directly with light, using everyday object in his works, he started to get fame.

His success in the commercial photography was due his high work ethic, he works with the commissioned photographs with the same ambition as in his own art. He had three rules: prepared the lightning before the ”patience” arrived, shoot from 3 meters from the patience to avoid disturbing the subject face and asked them to close their eyes and to suddenly open them. Ray took maximum of 12 photographs of each subject and cropped then carefully in the dark room setting. He was able to capture the personality of his Subjects, the real nature of their existence.

 Accidentally Ray Man discovered solarization, which inverse the value of the negative. Man Ray used this technique to paint his photographs, and they came more like a drawing. It was a risky technique, since Ray Man may add the paint straight from his negative. With time Man Ray became a master of solarization and used it in many of his work.

                                                         

Man ray defined a good photo as a play of contrast, a lesson Ray learned from chess” Between a white and black square is fundamentally beautiful”.  In his photography and radiography there is the playfulness of shadow and light, straight lines and curves, symmetry in how hands and faces are distributed. One great example is the photograph of the face and mask.

For me the most interesting thing I learned while watching the film was that Man Ray made his commercial photography extension for his art. He lived double lives as the narrator said, a life of a painter and a life of a photographer. With his commercial works he was able to afford his Avant garde art, which I found encouraging. In my opinion part of his success in fashion was only because he was interested in arts, and he was able to make commercial photography art as well. 

- Sanni