she saw:
Keith Foster
she said:"the size of the wave is unbelievable, i love the black and white tones, and the drama of it."
he saw:
Man Ray
he said:
Man Ray
when i was in high school i became really interested in surrealism through the work of Salvador Dali. from within the surrealist movement i became interested in dadaism, and from there ended up at the work of Man Ray.
originally a painter, he grew to become one of the first truly multi-media artists. i became interested in his work through his experimental photography, but he's also known today for his varied contributions to fashion and portrait photography, collage, film work, and sculpture. he was also considered a conceptual artist years before that term would come to be widely used.
what i found fascinating about his work was his ability to bring various skills to whichever medium he chose to work in. his commercial photography work demonstrated a more than adequate skill level or technical proficiency for straight-forward image making, but he insisted upon taking the images a step further.
at a time when many respected photographers did little to edit their images, even by way of tinting or cropping, man ray applied many darkroom techniques to his photos to alter their final appearance. one of his most famous techniques was solarization. it involved exposing the image onto the photo paper, then during the developing process exposing the paper to another light source, be it a lamp or sometimes direct sunlight, for a short time, before returning to the darkroom to finish the developing process. this left the image with a sometimes silver, sometimes black halo and accentuated certain lines in the images so as to appear half positive and half negative.
he also pioneered a form of abstract photography using photograms he re-named "rayographs." often times photograms are created when simple objects are placed on light sensitive paper and exposed to a light source- usually direct sunlight. when processed, the objects leave their silhouettes on the paper and can be arranged into various shapes or patterns. Man Ray took this a step further, creating sometimes elaborate geometrical designs using cut-outs, templates, and involving multiple exposures.
it was this experimental work that influenced me most. my senior thesis in college involved a series of manipulated images accompanied by a short prose piece from a fellow surrealist playwright and poet, Antonin Artaud. the images featured a sleeping model who, in her dreams, took on various identities and textures, before emerging from that consciousness as the sum of those parts. the idea was that whatever identies we assume in fantasy are just as valid as our "waking" or conscious identity, and that ultimately the reality of our true selves is not, nor does it have to be, separate from the fantasy of our dream selves. wow, pretty self-indulgent and artsy-fartsy, right?
since what i was doing was all hand-made and pre-photoshop, it was messy and involved lots of trial and error. i needed lots of space to lay out templates for multiple exposures, over multiple developers, and i often did the work overnight at the college's large communal darkroom. considering how easily experimental photography can fail, and the way in which it's usually received (poorly), i got a lot of positive feedback and encouragement for my efforts, if not the final product. if i'm feeling particularly brave, maybe i'll scan and post some of it in the future. at any rate, i couldn't help but feel like i was channeling Man Ray as i stooped over my construction paper mattes and templates, shuffling from one developing tray to another.
Man Ray also got me started on photo-collage, and collage in general. thanks to the introduction his work provided, i discovered other photo-collagists like Peter Beard, Walter Ioos, and the late Dan Eldon, and as i think about my photographic goals and philosophies, it all seems to first point back to Man Ray...
Man Ray
when i was in high school i became really interested in surrealism through the work of Salvador Dali. from within the surrealist movement i became interested in dadaism, and from there ended up at the work of Man Ray.
originally a painter, he grew to become one of the first truly multi-media artists. i became interested in his work through his experimental photography, but he's also known today for his varied contributions to fashion and portrait photography, collage, film work, and sculpture. he was also considered a conceptual artist years before that term would come to be widely used.
what i found fascinating about his work was his ability to bring various skills to whichever medium he chose to work in. his commercial photography work demonstrated a more than adequate skill level or technical proficiency for straight-forward image making, but he insisted upon taking the images a step further.
at a time when many respected photographers did little to edit their images, even by way of tinting or cropping, man ray applied many darkroom techniques to his photos to alter their final appearance. one of his most famous techniques was solarization. it involved exposing the image onto the photo paper, then during the developing process exposing the paper to another light source, be it a lamp or sometimes direct sunlight, for a short time, before returning to the darkroom to finish the developing process. this left the image with a sometimes silver, sometimes black halo and accentuated certain lines in the images so as to appear half positive and half negative.
he also pioneered a form of abstract photography using photograms he re-named "rayographs." often times photograms are created when simple objects are placed on light sensitive paper and exposed to a light source- usually direct sunlight. when processed, the objects leave their silhouettes on the paper and can be arranged into various shapes or patterns. Man Ray took this a step further, creating sometimes elaborate geometrical designs using cut-outs, templates, and involving multiple exposures.
it was this experimental work that influenced me most. my senior thesis in college involved a series of manipulated images accompanied by a short prose piece from a fellow surrealist playwright and poet, Antonin Artaud. the images featured a sleeping model who, in her dreams, took on various identities and textures, before emerging from that consciousness as the sum of those parts. the idea was that whatever identies we assume in fantasy are just as valid as our "waking" or conscious identity, and that ultimately the reality of our true selves is not, nor does it have to be, separate from the fantasy of our dream selves. wow, pretty self-indulgent and artsy-fartsy, right?
since what i was doing was all hand-made and pre-photoshop, it was messy and involved lots of trial and error. i needed lots of space to lay out templates for multiple exposures, over multiple developers, and i often did the work overnight at the college's large communal darkroom. considering how easily experimental photography can fail, and the way in which it's usually received (poorly), i got a lot of positive feedback and encouragement for my efforts, if not the final product. if i'm feeling particularly brave, maybe i'll scan and post some of it in the future. at any rate, i couldn't help but feel like i was channeling Man Ray as i stooped over my construction paper mattes and templates, shuffling from one developing tray to another.
Man Ray also got me started on photo-collage, and collage in general. thanks to the introduction his work provided, i discovered other photo-collagists like Peter Beard, Walter Ioos, and the late Dan Eldon, and as i think about my photographic goals and philosophies, it all seems to first point back to Man Ray...
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