Swedish Landscape, 1925

This unique work is among the noteworthy successes of Man Ray’s experiments in making photographic images without a camera—images that he christened "Rayographs" in 1922. His inspired explorations generated some of the most radical, mysterious, and compelling works in the history of the medium. While the majority of his Rayographs present ghostly abstractions or suggest eccentric still life subjects, “Swedish Landscape” is a rare example that bears a specific and unexpected title, inscribed by the artist on both the reverse of the print and on the mount. While seeming to identify this surprising subject, the title, typically for Man Ray, serves rather to deepen than to clarify the enigma of the composition. This Rayograph is notable also in that it was used by the artist as the basis of a 1924–1925 oil-on-canvas painting, titled in French “Paysage Suédois.”

Rayographs were made in the darkroom by placing selected objects on a sheet of photo-sensitized paper. When exposed to light and according to the direction and diffusion of that light source, the shapes of the objects would be registered in intriguing ways on the paper. Once developed and fixed, and depending on the relative opacity or transparency of the objects chosen and the way light may have refracted through them, strange forms, distortions, and shadows in a nuanced range of tonalities are made visible. As there is no negative involved, the technique yields a unique photographic print.

While justly acknowledged as an innovation, Man Ray’s camera-less works in fact take us back to the beginnings of photography in the 1830s, notably to the pioneering experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot in England and Hippolyte Bayard in France. Talbot’s “photogenic drawings,” as he called them, were the first crucial step in his formal invention of photography, announced in 1839. Regarding his own discovery of this process, Man Ray wrote in his memoir, Self Portrait, “I remembered when I was a boy, placing fern leaves in a printing frame with proof paper, exposing it to sunlight and obtaining a white negative of the leaves.” Poet Tristan Tzara, the first associate with whom Man Ray shared his achievement, was enthusiastic about the concept, acknowledging these works, according to Man Ray, as “pure dada creations.” Tzara described “projections, surprised in transparency, in the light of tenderness, of dreaming objects that are walking in their sleep.” (quoted in N. Baldwin, Man Ray, London, 1989, p. 97).

It is likely that the present Rayograph was exhibited at the 1929 Stuttgart exhibition “Film und Foto”, as Werner Gräff's Es kommt derNeue Fotograf!, an anthology of a selection of the pictures shown at the landmark exhibition, includes a reproduction of “Swedish Landscape”.

The Rayograph was given by Man Ray to his friend Leo Farland of New York City in the 1960s. It re-emerged in 2000 when purchased by the late owner in the historic New York auction of The Collection of 7-Eleven, Inc.