ANALYSIS- MAN RAY

MAN RAY

This piece of art work was done by Man Ray. Born Emmanuel Radnitzky, August 27,1890 and died November 18,1976. He was an american modernist artist who spent most of his career in Paris. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements. This piece of work is called 'Gun with alphabet stencils'. It's a photogram or 'Rayographs' was the term Man Ray used for his photograms. The work was done in 1924. I chose to analyse this piece of work because we were looking photograms,and Man Ray considers him self one of the pioneers of photograms and we used pretty much the same techniques.

To better understand Man Ray, I looked at his other pieces of work.

Image 1

 Image 2.

And also at his own website Man Ray Website

"I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence."

I would say that Man Ray is very abstract in the way he works, from switching between the traditional form of painting and going on to do some photography, he at times doesn't have a set theme on his work and I admire him for this because it allows him to do his work without any limitations. I don't think this particular photogram has a set theme, it could be one of death because of the obvious gun in it, however there are no bullets in the gun which then contradicts this and may not be intended as something quite dark and violent. I would also thought that the photogram was of children's toys,because the wooden blocks could be made for children and was a toy which was played with a lot in older days and amongst younger children, and then the development from playing with harmless wooden blocks to fake toy guns. Also the round objects could be balls, again something which can somewhat cause some form of violence but is not intended to harm anyone. The title for it is quite basic and only depicts what actually is on the photogram rather than what it is about,so you have to gather your own views on it. 

The technique used by Man Ray was simply, placing the photographic paper under the enlarger, place and arrange objects on the paper and then expose, for proximately 6 seconds. Because the image is a photogram there would be no colour, only the outline of the objects. Not having any colour allows the viewer to add their own colour into the image, making it somewhat more personal and more their own. The formal elements which are quite important in this piece of work is definitely shape, because it tells you what exactly the image is of, and because there is no colour the photogram technique relays a lot on shape. 

I have chosen to look at Man Ray because we have been doing photograms during our lesson and he was one of the pioneers in this technique. My first reaction to the work was what was it about, because from the given objects you don't really know straight away, the objects spark up questions in your mind as to what it might be. What I dislike about the image is the actual technique itself, I don't really like photograms in general because you don't get all the details of the image and you have to sort of figure it out on your own. What I like about the work is that it's completely random and quite expressionist. This particular piece of work hasn't inspired me as such, but it has inspired me to try and do more photograms.