A New Method of Realizing the Artistic Possibilities of Photography

Experiments in Abstract Form, Made without a Camera Lens, by Man Ray, the American Painter

MAN Ray—the well-known American painter now living in Paris and closely allied with the modern school of French art—has recently been experimenting along new lines with the artistic possibilities of photography. These "rayographs", as he calls them, are made, without the aid of a .camera lens, by interposing the objects photographed between the light, which is made to fall upon them in a certdin way, and a sheet of sensitive paper. Jean Cocteau, the French critic, has written of these prints that they are "meaningless masterpieces,in which are realized the. most voluptuous velvets of the aquafortist. There has never been anyone else who*has been able to produce anything like this scale of blacks sinking into each other, of shadows and half shadows? He has come to set painting free again. His mysterious groups are infinitely better than any of the ordinary still-lifes which attempt to conquer the flat canvas and the elurive mud of the colors."