FASHION. This all-around artist radically changed fashion photography and incorporated it to become an art form in itself. This exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg, in Paris, shows how Man Ray went about to do it.
Man Ray, born by the name of Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890 – 1976), was also a filmmaker and a painter. He was the sole American to play a major role in both the Dada- and the Surrealist movements. His friend Marcel Duchamp introduced him to the avant-garde scene during the roaring twenties in Paris.
This visual artist, although hoping for a career as a painter, made his breakthrough as a photographer and notably a fashion photographer. He revolutionised that art form and presented fashion in a totally new way. From mostly drawings to placid pictures, fashion became, through his lens, elevated to an art. Man Ray worked for Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar and French Vogue.
The exhibition, at Musée du Luxembourg, in Paris, starts off with a ready-made “à la Duchamps” with hangers that cast an interesting shadow on the whitewashed walls. They also give us a glimpse into the childhood that Man Ray tried to hide all his life: namely his Jewish father’s work as a tailor in Brooklyn. Man Ray has made some interesting collage with needles and thread that are displayed along with photographs and clothes from different famous designers that he worked with.
His career as a fashion photographer started off with Paul Poiret, one of Paris leading couturiers. He was then commissioned to work for Madeleine Vionnet, Coco Chanel and his favourite, Elsa Schiaparelli. The museum shows some great pictures of Schiaparelli and some of her dresses.
One of my favourite pictures is “Tears”: an enlarged photography of an eye with tears rolling down the cheeks. It was used as an advertisement for a mascara brand that didn’t leak. Man Ray’s own favourite picture though is surrealistic: Denise Poiret posing next to a Brancusi statue, which emanates light. “I combine art and fashion”, he said. Mixing objects with real figures were part of the surrealist movement, exposing the thin thread between what’s dead and what’s alive.
This vast exhibition also exposes his different photographic techniques such as rayographs and solarisations that he invented with Lee Miller, his mistress and assistant. These techniques were used to illuminate part of the picture and to approach Dadaism through different media. Again he linked art and fashion photography.
Did Man Ray contribute to make photography an art in itself and by the same token fashion as well? Not then and there maybe but he certainly contributed to giving it its current notoriety. Not badly done for a modest immigrant’s son!
