Man Ray Was So A lot Extra Than a Photographer

Stepping into the exhibition Man Ray: When Objects Dream at The Metropolitan Museum of Art looks like coming into the bellows of an previous digital camera. Through an oblong body minimize into the entry, the darkened partitions unfold, accordion-like, to disclose a visible feast of the artist’s work, as Man Ray’s earliest movie, “Retour à la raison (Return to Reason)” (1923), glints throughout the display screen reverse. Although the exhibition brings collectively roughly 160 works from a powerful array of lenders, it reveals itself progressively, taking the viewer via a number of turns earlier than one can grasp its sheer enormity. When Objects Dream proves, thrillingly, that anybody left feeling jaded from the various, many latest exhibitions surrounding Surrealism’s centennial in 2024 can nonetheless see the motion’s key photographer with a contemporary set of eyes.

The exhibition opens and closes with Man Ray’s photographic undertaking Champs Délicieux (Delicious Fields) (1922–59) and, liable to being corny, the prints are certainly très délicieux. Though the “rayographs” — pictures taken with no digital camera by instantly exposing objects on light-sensitive paper — dematerialize their objects, turning them into ghostly goals, seeing the works in particular person permits one to recuperate the fantastic materiality of the prints themselves — splashes of darkroom chemistry, whorls of fingerprints, the uneven software of airbrushed paint. Even the creases on the high of “La femme (Woman)” (1918–20) remind us that these works reside objects. This was as Man Ray himself supposed, because the Surrealists always performed with tactility of their work; the extra interactive options of the exhibition, just like the spinning print turnstile of “Facsimile of Revolving Doors” (1919), likewise honor this precept.

While the exhibition facilities Man Ray’s Nineteen Twenties rayographs, it reveals that the Surrealist was a lot greater than a photographer. This is demonstrated not simply by the huge array of media on view — from movie to portray to printmaking to stereography to sculpture to chess and again once more — but additionally via the best way these works are organized and described by the wall textual content. Man Ray’s cleverly phallic portrait of an egg beater, “L’Homme (Man)” (1918), hangs throughout from his cliché-verre “The Egg Beater” (1923), which appears just like the technical drawing for some form of Rube Goldberg machine. The sample of a cheese grater seems in a portray, and reappears as an impression on a rayograph, whereas the movies animate the nonetheless photographic impressions. Man Ray thus comes throughout much less as a photographer — although this stays his biggest legacy — and extra as an artist-inventor, tinkering away with mild and objects and having a superb chortle all of the whereas.

My one quibble is with the museum’s curious choice to fully omit the phrase “photogram” from the exhibition. (The press release explains this distinction, although I didn’t see it written wherever within the wall textual content of the bodily present.) Though “photogram” is the first time period for a picture taken by inserting objects on light-sensitive paper, most informal guests will go away the exhibition beneath the misguided impression that Man Ray’s neologism “rayograph” is the phrase for this follow — although the artist was just about the one one that referred to as it that. While it is smart to make use of this little bit of self-branding to explain Man Ray’s personal course of, one would assume that it may be price giving such context for the central physique of labor within the exhibition (Man Ray was not the one particular person making photograms within the Nineteen Twenties, in spite of everything). These sorts of entrepreneurial self-stylings have a protracted historical past in pictures, together with Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype and Henry Fox Talbot’s talbotype. Man Ray’s work stands up tremendously nicely in opposition to the historical past of pictures writ massive — he doesn’t want The Met to bolster his model.

Man Ray: When Objects Dream continues on the Metropolitan Museum of Art (5000 Fifth Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) via February 1, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson.