Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) b. 1890, Philadelphia; d. 1976, Paris Man Ray was a key member of the Dada and Surrealist circles in New York and Paris from the 1910s through the 1930s. Although best known for his photographs, and next for his humorous or unsettling object-sculptures, Man Ray rested his claim to art above all on his activities as a painter. He nevertheless marketed his other skills tactically. Arriving in Paris in 1921, he quickly established himself as a portrait photographer, working with artists and for magazines such as Vanity Fair and Vogue. At the same time, his cameraless images, which he dubbed "rayographs," were well publicized and became key symbols of innovation for artists throughout Europe. In 1940, Man Ray relocated for ten years to Los Angeles, where he was given his first retrospective exhibition (1944). Museum shows and critical studies have followed regularly since the mid-1960s. Rayograph with Hand and Egg, 1922 Gelatin-silver print photogram, 9 1/2 x 7 inches (24.1 x 17.8 cm) Man Ray described the fantasy-laden imprint of objects placed on or above photosensitive paper and exposed without the intermediary of a camera as a liberation that let him create "directly with light itself." These new photographs also stressed origination rather than reproduction, the conventional function of photography. In this image, for instance, the artist moved his hand during exposure to create a second "shadow" hand seemingly from thin air. In their day, Man Ray's darkroom experiments had an allure of science and mystery. Given that context, the egg balanced on the artist's fingertip may be likened to Christopher Columbus's presentation, egg in hand, to the Spanish court, in which he proposed that the world was a globe and as such could be circumnavigated. The ovoid fingered by Man Ray hangs upside down, however. In the new world of the rayograph, objects float as planes of light and darkness, and the earth is made flat once more. —Matthew S. Witkovsky