May Ray’s Objects on Film at the Met

Today, works like these are usually called photograms. But, writer Tristan Tzara dubbed Man Ray’s works “rayographs.” Tzara, a key figure alongside Man Ray in the “anti-art” Dada movement,​​ also named earlier cameraless photographs by Christian Schad “schadographs.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition, Man Ray: When Objects Dream, features about sixty rayographs created between 1922 and 1930. One from 1923 incorporates a circle of lace, perhaps as a nod to William Henry Fox Talbot’s medium-defining 1845 negative image of lace. Two rayographs from 1922 lay out flowers and leaves, recalling the lesser-known work of the photographer and botanist Anna Atkins, who documented plant life starting in 1841.

Other rayographs index dishes, hardware, wire scraps, blocks, and tools. The best are illogical but still cohesive, suggesting objects in motion and snippets from larger, even stranger scenes. A 1923 rayograph shows an arrangement of cigarette-sized rods with squared-off edges spiraling out like liberated piano keys or parts from a necklace. Another from 1922 depicts a reveler with an egg for an eyeball who appears to be wolfing down a drink. Two storybook-style 1925 rayographs evoke moonlit escapes over windswept mountains and presage Man Ray’s eventual escape to Los Angeles when the Nazis occupied France. (Born Emmanuel “Manny” Radnitzky, he was bar-mitzvahed back in Brooklyn.)

At the heart of When Objects Dream, dramatically lit, black painted temporary walls display many of the rayographs. A light table lays out facsimiles of the film strips used to complete the two-and-a-half-minute 1923 abstract film, Retour à la Raison (Return to Reason), which plays on a loop in the same gallery. It involves objects twirling, blurry night scenes in Paris, and effects achieved by scattering pins, thumbtacks, and salt and pepper on the film before developing it. 

Mostly brighter galleries surround this dark core. Here, exhibition curators Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen Pinson construct the argument that rayographs were both an outgrowth of Man Ray’s earlier work and informed what he created in media afterwards. He moved both easily and restlessly between mediums, and at the Met, most started to look like rayographs. Studying the holes in a ladle found in a rayograph from 1922 leads one eventually to the repeated dots drawn around and on top of a painted propeller in a work on paper, 6,396,781, 1922.

A set of photographic experiments, clichés-verre from 1917, are anxious illustrations— one a jumbled orchestra pit, another a bustle of umbrellas under a fire escape. Later photographic experiments include Man Ray and Lee Miller’s surrealist solarizations, which resulted in sometimes erotic portraits with halo-like outlines. Objects and compositional strategies Man Ray used in the rayographs turn up again in drawings, paintings, sculptures, films, and other kinds of photographs. Retour à la Raison, the film, is also the title of a 1921 painting. Man Ray photographed Lampshade, 1921, his painted wood and metal sculpture that could have easily fit in Retour à la Raison. He also used it to intertwine Tristan Tzara and artist friend Jean Cocteau in a pleasant 1922 double portrait.

​The works in the show are not all equally compelling. The least charismatic ones seem rushed, like baubles or frozen screensavers. ​Further, the exhibition sometimes feels like comfort food, an escapist binge of a canonical figure. It could have been improved through the inclusion of contextualizing works by other artists and more substantial explication of Man Ray’s artistic dialogues— with, among others, Miller, Tsara, Schad, and László Moholy-Nagy, who created his own influential photograms. Efforts in this direction would temper the hovering heroic air at the Met— signal of a slide back into the carnival-barker, self-aggrandizement common in the European avant-garde, with too many exhibitions about it.