Man Ray et la mode

Description

It was in 1922, when he had just arrived in Paris, that Man Ray took his first steps in fashion photography. He took many portraits of prominent figures in the Parisian milieu, including members of the American colony, representatives of high society, artists and writers. He soon received commissions in the field of advertising and fashion because of his easily identifiable style, that of the surrealist group, which plays wonderfully with scandal and provocation.
His perfectly mastered work, tempered by a classicism of good tone, spiced up by a smooth eroticism generates images that can be fully assimilated by his clients. At the turn of the 1930s, Man Ray evolved towards a more spontaneous style, in line with the evolution of the female model, which was brilliantly enhanced by technical devices such as solarization, negative inversion, cut-outs and superimpositions.
The years spent under contract with the American magazine Harper's Bazaar (1934-1939) consecrated the technical and formal freedom of the photographer and marked his apogee in this field. Through the eyes of an artist, painter and photographer, it is also the relationship between the fashion of an entire era, that of the interwar period, and its representation that is highlighted here.