CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/17/2018

'Shape of Light' presents 100 years of photography and abstract art

Man Ray's 1930 photograph, "Anatomies," is reproduced from Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art, co-published by D.A.P. and Tate to accompany the major survey currently on view in London. "André Breton saw Man Ray as 'the man with the magic lantern head,' who invented an automatic form of writing, photographed the domain of the shadows, spirits, 'ghosts,' 'the unreality contained within reality itself,'" Emmanelle de l'Ecotais writes of the artist's related rayographs. "'The forms are dispossessed of the meaning of the object and play off themselves by the simple contact or chance or a premeditation of an intellectual or mysterious order.' This was how Man Ray became the surrealist photographer par excellence."