Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky, 1890–1976) pioneered techniques
of producing surrealist images by means of darkroom manipulation.
Born in Philadelphia, he began his artistic career as a painter before
he took up photography in 1916. In 1921 he moved to Paris, where
he spent most of the rest of his life. He is best known for developing,
with his lover and assistant Lee Miller, the process of solarization.
In this, the negative or print is briefly exposed to light and as a
consequence the tones are partially reversed, often giving the effect
of outlining the body in his nude studies. Man Ray’s career also
encompassed fashion and advertising photography.
Graphic experiments and other explorations with the photographic
medium remained popular in the 1940s and 1950s, often
introducing new elements, for example the natural landscapes in the
work of the British photographer Bill Brandt (1904–1983). In a series
of nudes photographed on the beaches of East sussex, he used a
wide-angle lens in close-up, giving extreme distortions of the body,
and printed the images in high-contrast black and white. These
startlingly white bodies photographed in the English countryside
seem to be a part of the landscape—the nude returned to nature,
free of the artifices of civilization. Man Ray
Man Ray is best known for his solarized
images, made by briefly exposing the
negative to light before it is chemically fixed.
Natacha, taken in about 1930, exists in a
positive version as well as in the negative
version shown here.18 THE HIsTORy OF NuDE PHOTOGRAPHy
Bill Brandt
Nude, East Sussex Coast (1957) is one of
a series of images in which Brandt placed
his models on rocky beaches and created
sculpturelike forms with the use of a wide-
angle lens and a low viewpoint.