Untitled

In late 1921 the American Dada painter and photographer Man Ray produced his first photograms—photographs made without a camera by placing objects on a sheet of light-sensitive paper, then exposing the arrangement to light. He claimed to have stumbled upon the process, which he dubbed “Rayographs,” by chance; it turned out to be an appropriate method for an artist who looked to accidental and automatic occurrences for inspiration. With unexpected combinations of everyday objects, Rayographs articulated a key Dada interest in homemade, “anti-art” reworkings of industrial and consumer society. Man Ray frequently used translucent items like glass bottles, filmstrips, and feathers, valuing their gradation of tones and illusion of three-dimensionality. “They looked startlingly new and mysterious,” he later wrote. With these cameraless images, photography straddled the line between abstraction and representation. Dada leader Tristan Tzara called them “pure Dada creations.”