In the summer of 1940, after almost 20 years in Paris, Man Ray fled the Nazis for the country of his birth. Disliking New York, where he’d spent his youth, he made for the West Coast. He hoped to get as far as Tahiti or Hawaii. But his trip came to an end when, braced by the space, lifted by the lack of skyscrapers (‘made me feel taller’) and swept off his feet by a dancing girl (the latest in a long line of hoofers for whom he’d have the hots), he settled in Los Angeles. Though he would live there for more than decade, he never really liked the place.
Nonetheless, he was far more productive in America than in Europe. In his brisk, almost pointillist biography for Yale’s ‘Jewish Lives’ series, Arthur Lubow estimates that Ray’s work rate tripled in America. Not that the work came easy. Ray disliked what everyone else loves about California: the light. He said it was too harsh and sharp. He liked fuzz and blur and spectral glow. He missed the grey shades of his Parisian garret and ordered that the windows of his studio should not be cleaned, the better for the dirt and grime to tone things down a little.
He never aimed for the hard-edged clarity of Dali and Magritte (fellow surrealists determined that their oneiric visions looked like studies of the empirical world). He was after a more feathery or flocculent feel. Both solarisation and Rayography, the two revolutionary darkroom techniques he accidentally invented, go against the grain of the history of photography in that they insist on less, not more, clarity in the finished image. To be sure, Ray’s most famous work, ‘The Gift’, a flatiron with a row of thumbtacks fixed to its soleplate, could be deadly in the wrong hands.
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