On Writing with Photography

Chapter 4: Captured Things: Man Ray’s Object Photography

Among his many artistic occupations, Man Ray is known for assembling objects and for making photographs. As bricoleur of three-dimensional things, he produced some of his most celebrated works: Lampshade, Cadeau, and Object to Be Destroyed among them. Yet he is probably most uniformly embraced as a photographer, with an output that ranges from glamorous spreads in fashion magazines and portraits of his fellow artists to seemingly uninflected copy photographs or the oneiric frames that helped define surrealist visuality. A key, yet overlooked, component of his photography is that which records his assemblages. In the essay that follows, I consider how certain of Man Ray’s object assemblages have been mediated by the photograph, and subsequently deployed on the printed page. While it is undeniable that Man Ray valued his assemblages as three-dimensional works, many of them circulated most noticeably as photographs in journals and books, and in some cases, took form solely for the camera. Having been accepted as straightforward documents of anterior creations ,such photographs have rarely been treated as primary objects of study. But as I will argue, their very efficacy in the task of documentation has elided a secondary effect of supersession that in fact comprises the greater part of their function. These photographs, in their ability to perform for the object, have in effect taken the place of the object, subverting any generative relationship between the source and its image.This operation thereby complicates the paradigm of indexicality against which much photography  4 Captured Things Man Ray’s Object Photography JANINE MILEAF  JANINE MILEAF has been theorized. Almost without exception, the works of Man Ray’s object art that we accept today as inventions of the interwar years are known through reproductive means—the originals having disappeared long ago. Both replicated as three-dimensional works and circulated in the pages of print media as photographs, these objects generate series of coequal likenesses that undermine a strictly indexical reading of their significance. Instead, the photograph works in tandem with the object, as each forces the other out of view, while simultaneously depending upon its authority. Man Ray’s photographs of objects take a number of formats. Some, like the celebrated image of a dangling eggbeater, which has been titled Man and La Femme (Woman) in different contexts, were conceptualized as Figure 4.1. Man Ray, Cadeau, 1921. Gelatin silver print. Private collection. Copyright 2011 Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris. Captured Things  photographs. Man Ray never titled or exhibited an actual eggbeater as art, so its image has been securely placed within his photographic oeuvre, appearing in contexts reserved for that medium.1 In contrast, the very wellknown photograph of the assemblage Cadeau (), or Gift, a flatiron with metal tacks upended and glued to its surface, has always been viewed transparently as a record of its subject (Figure .). Until recently, this likeness of Cadeau was never exhibited as a gelatin silver print—that is, in the physical form of a photograph. It was therefore received as the sort of copy print that Man Ray regularly made for hire—an uninflected document of an independent work. Between these two extremes of copy photograph and autonomous creation lie images that capture assemblages in varying degrees of permanence. In what follows, I will consider this range of production as “object photography,” those images that operate in relationship to Man Ray’s assemblages, whether conceived as temporary arrangements or enduring works of art.  Because it marks one of the most complex demonstrations of the relationship between Man Ray’s assemblages and their photographic portrayals , the case of Cadeau requires elaboration. Typical of his early works, the assemblage begins with a household object—the iron—and brings to it a sense of danger and seduction through the addition of an incongruous element—the tacks. Combining the domestic femininity of the curvaceous iron and the implied sensation of heat with the destructiveness of the shredding tacks, this work at once doubles the female form and suggests her potential mutilation. Named as an offering, or gift, it further marks an exchange that establishes a relationship between artist and viewer.2 The familiar story that Man Ray tells about the fabrication of Cadeau takes place at the opening of his first exhibition in Paris, which was held at the avant-garde bookstore Librairie Six in . On that...