.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
Ideas Captured in Light –
The Magic of Rayographs
Philippe Garner
Man Ray’s experiments in making photographic images without a camera—images that he christened “rayographs” in 1922—generated some of the most radical, mysterious and compelling works in the history of the medium. Having discovered the creative potential of this technique, he recognized an infinite terrain for exploration, engaging in the practice throughout his career, as evidenced in the Jacobs collection.
While justly acknowledged as an innovation, Man Ray’s camera-less works in fact take us back to the beginning of photography in the 1830s, notably to the experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot in England and Hippolyte Bayard in France. These two pioneers independently discovered how to make and fix the silhouette image of a flat object—typically a leaf specimen—on a sheet of paper impregnated with light-sensitive chemicals. 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.” But, as he explained, his chance reminder of this process in his makeshift Paris darkroom, when he unwittingly placed certain objects—“a small glass funnel, the graduate and the thermometer” —on a piece of unexposed paper, alerted him to fresh options. “I turned on the light” he wrote, “before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted by the glass…” (Self Portrait, Boston, 1988, p. 106). Man Ray’s experiments differed significantly from photograms produced in the 19th century, in that they recorded the impressions of three-dimensional objects and their shadows, a distinction that warranted them the right to be classified under an entirely new name and the term ‘rayograph’—acknowledging their inventor—was born.
Jean Cocteau was the first to report Man Ray’s innovation, in an effusive feature in the April-May 1922 issue of Les fruilles libres. The earliest published reference to these works as “rayographs” appeared in Vanity Fair in November 1922 in a feature illustrating four examples. 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). Tzara would write the introductory text “La photographie à l'envers” (Photography upside-down) for the portfolio of facsimile rayographs that Man Ray published later in 1922 under the title Champs Délicieux.
Man Ray had opened up a magical, pictorial world in which material things appeared dematerialized—present only as specters—and thus no longer illustrations of anything recognizable. Objects became abstracted light, dancing in a dark illusory space, reaching those unmappable fields of the imagination that so fascinated the Surrealists.
The Magic of Rayographs
Philippe Garner
Man Ray’s experiments in making photographic images without a camera—images that he christened “rayographs” in 1922—generated some of the most radical, mysterious and compelling works in the history of the medium. Having discovered the creative potential of this technique, he recognized an infinite terrain for exploration, engaging in the practice throughout his career, as evidenced in the Jacobs collection.
While justly acknowledged as an innovation, Man Ray’s camera-less works in fact take us back to the beginning of photography in the 1830s, notably to the experiments of William Henry Fox Talbot in England and Hippolyte Bayard in France. These two pioneers independently discovered how to make and fix the silhouette image of a flat object—typically a leaf specimen—on a sheet of paper impregnated with light-sensitive chemicals. 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.” But, as he explained, his chance reminder of this process in his makeshift Paris darkroom, when he unwittingly placed certain objects—“a small glass funnel, the graduate and the thermometer” —on a piece of unexposed paper, alerted him to fresh options. “I turned on the light” he wrote, “before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted by the glass…” (Self Portrait, Boston, 1988, p. 106). Man Ray’s experiments differed significantly from photograms produced in the 19th century, in that they recorded the impressions of three-dimensional objects and their shadows, a distinction that warranted them the right to be classified under an entirely new name and the term ‘rayograph’—acknowledging their inventor—was born.
Jean Cocteau was the first to report Man Ray’s innovation, in an effusive feature in the April-May 1922 issue of Les fruilles libres. The earliest published reference to these works as “rayographs” appeared in Vanity Fair in November 1922 in a feature illustrating four examples. 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). Tzara would write the introductory text “La photographie à l'envers” (Photography upside-down) for the portfolio of facsimile rayographs that Man Ray published later in 1922 under the title Champs Délicieux.
Man Ray had opened up a magical, pictorial world in which material things appeared dematerialized—present only as specters—and thus no longer illustrations of anything recognizable. Objects became abstracted light, dancing in a dark illusory space, reaching those unmappable fields of the imagination that so fascinated the Surrealists.