Man Ray 1890-1976

Előszó

On Man Ray Extract from "Le Surréalisme et la Peinture", Paris 1927 Translated from the French by Simon Watson Taylor1 Almost at the same time as Max Ernst, but in a different and, at first sight, almost opposite spirit, Man Ray alsó derived his initial impetus from photographic precepts. But far from entrusting himself to photography's avowed aims and making use, after the event, of the common ground of representation that it proposed, Man Ray has applied himself vigorously to the task of stripping it of its positive nature, of forcing it to abandon its arrogant air and pretentious claims. If, as Ramón Lulle has stated, "the mirror is a diaphanous body disposed to receive all the figures that are presented to it", then one cannot say as much for the photographic plate, which begins by requiring that these figures assume favorable attitudes, or goes even farther and takes them unawares at their most fugitive moments. These same considerations apply, indeed, to the taking of cinematographic images, which tend to compromise these figures not only in an inanimate state but alsó in motion. The photographic print, considered in isolation, is certainly permeated with an emotive value that makes it a supremely precious article of exchange [and when will all the books that are worth anything stop being illustrated with drawings and appear only with photographs?] Nevertheless, despite the fact that it is endowed with a special power of suggestion, it is not in the final analysis the faithful image that we aim to retain of something that will soon be gone for ever. At a time when painting, far outdistanced by photography in the pure and simple imitation of actual things, was posing to itself the problem of its reason for existence and was resolving the problem in the manner we have described, it was most necessarv for someone to come forward who should be not only an accomplished technician of photography but alsó an outstanding painter; someone who should, on the one hand, assign to photography the exact limits of the role that it can legitimately claim to play, and on the other hand, guide it towards other ends than those for which it appears to have been created - in par- Vissza