wo/MAN RAY. Le seduzioni della fotografia

CAMERA – The Italian Centre for Photography pays homage to a great master of the 20th century with wo/MAN RAY. Le seduzioni della fotografia, an exhibition curated by Walter Guadagnini and Giangavino Pazzola.
It features around two hundred photos taken from the 1920s onwards in Paris, where Man Ray was the absolute protagonist first of Dadaism and then of Surrealism until his death in 1976. The exhibition is dedicated in its entirety to a precise subject: the female figure, a source of inspiration for the artist’s whole oeuvre, particularly his photography.

Man Ray, but also Lee Miller, Berenice Abbott, Dora Maar and Meret Oppenheim. And Kiki de Montparnasse, Nusch Éluard, Juliet (his last wife): artists, models, friends, companions. And the leading lights in 1920s and 1930s Paris: Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard, Sylvia Beach and Youki Foujita Desnos. All of them were linked in different ways – and for different periods – to Emmanuel Radnitzky, known as Man Ray (born in Philadelphia in 1890); he arrived in the Ville Lumière in 1921 with a reputation as the “New York Dadaist”, introduced by Marcel Duchamp, a friend of Tristan Tzara (both of whom appear in the exhibition, the former en travesti and the latter flanked by an enormous female figure – a nude, naturally) and ready to show what magic could be done in a darkroom.

They are the male, and above all, female stars of CAMERA, alongside Man Ray, author of such legendary work as Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), Noire et blanche (1926) and La Prière (1930) – all of them on display – the favourite portraitist of intellectual and fashionable Paris, creator of “rayographs” and solarization, two photographic techniques that came to symbolise the avant-garde photography of the early 20th century.

CAMERA’s activity is made possible thanks to Intesa Sanpaolo, Lavazza, Eni and Reda and in particular the exhibition and cultural programming is supported by the Compagnia di San Paolo.