Painter, Photographer, Man Ray

“Personally, I have always preferred inspiration to information.”
Man Ray

For the expatriate American artist, who spent the majority of his life in the French Capital of Paris, Man Ray was unafraid of the new.   

As he is reported to have said “There are purists in all forms of expression. There are photographers who maintain that their medium has no relation to painting. There are painters who despise photography, although many in the last century have been inspired by it and used it. There are architects who refuse to hang a painting in their buildings maintaining that their own work is a complete expression…In the same spirit, when the automobile arrived, there were those that declared the horse to be the most perfect form of locomotion…All these attitudes result from a fear that one will replace the other. Nothing of the kind has happened. We have simply increased our range, our vocabulary. I see no one trying to abolish the automobile because we have the airplane.”

Man Ray started his artistic endeavors as a painter who adopted photography as a parallel form of expression. As he has explained “I was very fortunate in starting my career as a painter. When first confronted with a camera, I was very much intimidated. So I decided to investigate. But I maintained the approach of a painter to such a degree that I have been accused of trying to make a photograph look like a painting. I did not have to try, it just turned out that way because of my background and my training. Many years ago I had conceived the idea of making a painting look like a photograph! There was a valid reason for this. I wished to distract the attention from any manual dexterity, so that the basic idea stood out.”

For it was the expression of ideas that drove Man Ray’s art from his association with Dadaism and Surrealism to photographic experiments that led to the development of the “Rayograph” and improvements in solarization. As he says “I paint what cannot be photographed, that which comes from the imagination or from dreams, or from an unconscious drive. I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.”

Although he achieved fame and fortune through his photography, especially his commercial work and portraiture, Man Ray also painted throughout his life producing a major body of work. About which he has said “To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.”

The exhibition Man Ray – Human Equations which has an emphasis on his painted works is currently on show at Copenhagen’s Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek until the 20^th of September.

Exhibitions, What Are They Good For? – The Photography of Guy Bourdin

For most artists getting media coverage for an exhibition is an uphill battle. A double page spread that includes images of their work calls for celebratory drinks at a favored watering hole. Should this coverage be in an up market glossy magazine champagne may well be on the menu.

During the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s a double page spread of the work of the French, surrealist inclined, fashion photographer, Guy Bourdin, was a regular monthly inclusion in the pages of Vogue Paris. As fashion guru Colin McDowell wrote in The Business of Fashion, “I was working as a designer in Rome in the 1970s and I remember how everything in the atelier stopped, each month, as we pounced on the newly delivered copy of Vogue Paris. What were we looking for? What excitement did we expect? Nine times out of 10 it was a fashion shoot by the photographer Guy Bourdin with searingly bright colors, showing clothes as never shown before.”

Along with Helmut Newton, Bourdin is credited with transforming fashion photography from the attractive to that which attracts. A protégé of the American dada/surrealist artist Man Ray, Bourdin made images that hinted at meanings rather than articulating them and in which the fashion element was almost an afterthought.

The stylized violence and eroticism in a lot of his work has seen him accused of the objectification of women and demanding to the point of cruelty with his models. Although, his early 1980’s assistant, Sean Brandt, told the Guarding Newspaper "I never saw him being cruel. Guy would push his models, but only to get his vision recorded on celluloid. Probably a good analogy is good sex, a lot of foreplay, mucking around, games, teasing, hard work and then, usually very late at night, a miracle."

During his life time Bourdin was uninterested in holding exhibitions of his work his monthly exposure in Vogue was obviously enough. It is only after his death, with is son and heir Samuel Bourdin managing his father’s estate, that his work has been exhibited, ensuring that Bourdin’s legacy is not shrouded by obscurity.

A current exhibition of his work Guy Bourdin: Image Maker is on show at London’s Somerset House until the 15^th of March.