In the thick of it

Man Ray, born Michael Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890–1976) in Philadelphia, was a maker of images par excellence. He made sculptures, paintings and photographs, but the medium was always secondary to the image. After all, it is the reproduction of his marvellous painting ‘Observatory Time — The Lovers’, in which Lee Miller’s lips are emblazoned across the sky, that one remembers, or the reproduction of his object ‘Gift’, a flat iron with tacks stuck to its ironing face; not the originals. Perhaps the only sculpture one recalls as a three-dimensional presence is his ‘Indestructible Object’, a metronome with a photo of a woman’s eye attached to its swinging arm; and that’s chiefly because it moves.

Man Ray taught himself to take photos in order to record his paintings and sculptures, but he also had an incredible knack for being in the right place at the right time. He ended up being best known as a photographer because he established himself at the centre of a fascinating milieu of artists and he took exceptionally good — and often unforgettable — photographs of them.