Man Ray Analysis

Man Ray Exhibition

Man Ray, (born as Emmanuel Radnitzky August 27, 1890 - November 18, 1976) an american contemporary photographer, who although deceased, his work is still seen today and considered an inspiration for many photographers. Not only for his work but for the contribution to the Dada and Surrealism movements.
His fields ranged from painting, to working in the media, to even fashion photography. He's renowned for his avant-garde photography along with his fashion, portraiture and photograms.

To my pleasure I was able to witness his work first hand in the exhibition that was held at The National Portrait Gallery.  Upon entering, I realised that all of his work was quite small and quite delicate. It was really intimate and miniscule, it made you take time and admire his work carefully. Whereas in the Juergen Teller exhibition, each photo seemed to jump out and at surround you, consequently bringing you into Tellers world and seeing things through his eyes in an abrupt and punchy way, using large scale to his advantage that is, Man Ray took the more subtle approach, his miniscule scale and zero use of colour made the audience, including myself, appreciate his work. His work wasn't overwhelming, or overpowering, you wasn't thrown or engulfed forcefully into his work, instead quite the opposite.

When studying and observing Man Ray's work closely, it was obvious that a lot of careful planing and care went into his work, and a lot of factors were considered, positioning of the subject, lighting; whether it be key lighting or front lighting etc, and the different emotions he wanted his models to portray.

In all of his photographs there always is a high level of contrasting tones, along with different emotions that can evoke different interpretations and assumptions from the viewer/audience. An example of this is the picture above, whereas my personal reaction and the emotions I drew from this photo were sadness, loneliness and self consciousness, whereas others may assume it to be just positioning or simply boredom. I came to notice that Man Ray's main focus for work was the features of the face and the structure of the human body,its elegance. With the use of such methods as solarisation like the photo on the left give emphasis to her features while sitting profile. I find Man Rays work to always contain a certain of elegance, his work always seemed to be quite refined. There was no massive amount of theatrics, dramatization, there were quite simplistic and seemed quite natural.