Thesis Title: Study of Man Ray’s Surrealist and Dadaist Approach in Photography
By: Seyed Amir Mohammad Khadem Hosseini
Supervisor: Dr. Mohammad Khodadadi Motarjemzadeh
Degree: MA
Course of Study: Photography
September 2019
Abstract
Man Ray is one of the artists who brought the avant-garde and surrealist aspect into photography medium. At first glance, this artist takes a multi-faceted approach to photographic medium in his career. A view in which photography serves, on the one hand, its artistic expression and its avant-garde, and on the other hand, as a factor in serving popular and commodity culture . Although the artist himself, in manner of what he said, especially at the beginning of his career in the early twenties, make a solid line between these views, but his free and creative approach to the media made the two views quite clear and intertwines. In the meantime, Man Ray's creative approach to photography has led to the development of new techniques such as Rayograph and solarization that link these two perspectives and make Man Ray successful as both a photography artist and a commercial photographer. In addition to the social transformations of the early of the century, such as the proliferation of commodity culture and the transformation of concepts of production and consumption, Man Ray as an artist also applied his avant-garde and artistic approach to other fields such as fashion photography. This approach becomes even more evident in the artist's own career, as Man Ray called Rayograph as an experimental phenomenon out of the field of commercial photography, and separates the art field from the serious work and production s`pace. But about a decade later, in his first work for Harper's Bazaar, he used a Rayograph and signed it to art. In this thesis concentration is placed on the social context and also artistic movement which the artist lived in, to illustrate the relationship between Man Ray’s paradoxical but interwoven approaches through commercial and avant-garde photography.
Keywords: Man Ray, Solarization, Rayograph, dada, Surrealism, commodity culture