Man Ray

Born in Philadelphia in 1890 and died in Paris in 1976, Emmanuel Radnitsy, known as Man Ray, was one of the leading artists of the French modern scene. In 1911, he frequented Galerie 291, opened by photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who championed modern art and photography in the United States. In 1915, Man Ray met Marcel Duchamp and joined the Dada movement, an avant-garde intellectual and artistic movement. Noticing the lack of interest in this movement on the American scene, he moved to Paris in 1921, where he met the Surrealists, who greatly influenced him. His fashion photographs and celebrity portraits were acclaimed, thanks in particular to his rediscovery of solarization. His surrealist experiments earned him the Cultural Prize of the German Photographic Society in 1966 and the Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society in 1974. Today, Man Ray remains a leading figure in photography.