Man Ray (Spezial Fotografie: Portfolio Number 35)

Man Ray both loved and despised technology, hated its confines and longed to push back its frontiers. As a photographer, he combined an art and a craft, a discipline and a vision, with the result that nobody has given photography more innovative impetus. You enter a different era of photography when you encounter Man Ray, an American-born artist whose unflagging curiosity and keenness to experiment turned him into one of history's most important avant-garde photographers. In his eyes, light was anarchical and multi-dimensional, made shadows, changed the chemistry of his photographic plates and created effects that were inconceiveable with brushes and paints. With his passion for technology and an equally powerful vision, he was light-years ahead of most other photographers. In the 20s and 30s, his pictures were often regarded as technically flawed, and it was only later in the 60s that they became fashionable.