Legendary photographer Emmanuel Radnitzky, also known as Man Ray.
(Photo via Geoffrey Cobb)
The story of the Williamsburg native who photographed Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and pioneered photography as an art form.
BY GEOFFREY COBB | gcobb91839@aol.com
Before he became Man Ray, one of the most innovative photographers of the twentieth century, Emmanuel Radnitzky was a poor Jewish boy growing up in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn. Perhaps more than any other photographer, Ray helped establish photography as an art form.
Born in Philadelphia in 1890 to Russian Jewish immigrants, Ray was the son of a tailor. He moved with his family to Williamsburg when he was seven years old where the Radinsky family changed their surname to Ray, in reaction to the virulent anti-Semitism they encountered there. Emmanuel, who was called “Manny” as a nickname, changed his first name to Man and gradually began to call himself Man Ray.
He completed the prestigious Boys High School where he learned drafting. Offered a scholarship to study architecture, Ray decided instead to become an artist, much to the dismay of his impoverished parents.
Too poor to afford art school, Ray began to develop his talents at the Ferrer School, a free institute run by anarchists, where Ray learned figure drawing from accomplished painters Robert Henri and Ashcan painter George Bellows. He also befriended fellow Williamsburger Max Weber, whose familiarity with Cubism and Futurism stimulated him to create abstract art. The young artist was also heavily influenced by legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz, but even more so by the Armory Show, which introduced him to the works of Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marcel Duchamp whom he would later befriend.
Duchamp convinced him to move to Paris, where he arrived at age thirty-one in 1921. In 1922 he published Les Champs délicieux, a collection of camera-less photographs he called “rayographs.” Made by placing objects directly on photosensitive paper and exposing them to light, these mysterious images transformed ordinary objects into abstract forms and helped establish Man Ray as one of Paris’s leading experimental artists.
An introduction to the celebrated couturier Paul Poiret opened another avenue for Man Ray. Fashion photography provided both income and visibility, and he went on to work for magazines including Vogue, bringing the experimental techniques of the avant-garde into commercial photography. Many of the most famous people living in Paris posed for him and he showed an uncanny ability in photo sessions to take shots of them that captured his subjects’ unique inner qualities. James Joyce, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot,
Picasso, Dalí, Gertrude Stein, and other luminaries posed for his camera.
Ray became one of the first surrealist artists. Trying to create a Surrealist vision of the female form, he utilized solarization, cropping, and over-development to achieve surreal effects in his photos. He exhibited his work at the first Surrealist exhibition. in 1925, where he displayed an iconic art piece called Object To Be Destroyed, a famous Surrealist/Dada object made from an ordinary metronome with a photograph of an eye attached to the swinging arm.
Ray became intimate with surrealism’s founder André Breton and friends with other noted Surrealists including René Magritte, Luis Buñuel, the filmmaker, and Salvador Dalí, with whom he took an iconic portrait. He made several avant-garde films in the 1920s that cemented his reputation for being able to create art in different media, but it was his unmatched skill in the dark room that earned him enduring fame in Paris.
He was forced to flee his beloved Paris during World War II, but he returned there after the war, living there until the end of his life in 1976. In 2022, a buyer paid $12.4 million for an iconic Man Ray print sold at Christie’s, nearly tripling the record for the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.
His enduring importance, however, lies less in auction records than in the freedom with which he treated photography. For Man Ray, the camera was not simply a machine for recording the visible world; it was a tool for transforming it. Jean Cocteau aptly called him “the poet of the darkroom.”
Geoffrey Cobb is the author of “Greenpoint Brooklyn’s Forgotten Past.”
