Man Ray’s Mysteries, in Glorious Bloom at the Met

In his “rayographs,” he raved, he was finally “working directly with light itself.” The showstopper is the most expensive photograph ever sold at auction.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/06/arts/design/man-ray-metropolitan-museum-exhibition.html

By Arthur Lubow

Sept. 6, 2025

In the winter of 1921, Man Ray, who had moved that year from New York to Paris to be a painter, was earning a living through photography. One night he placed some objects on an unexposed piece of printing paper that had landed by mistake in the developing tray in his darkroom.

When he flicked on a light, ghostly images of a funnel and thermometer appeared on the sheet. He quickly put aside the fashion photographs he was preparing. He had discovered a new way of making pictures, which he called rayographs.

At least, that’s the story Man Ray told. One of the achievements of “Man Ray: When Objects Dream,” a revelatory exhibition opening on Sept. 14 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the diligent effort by the curators, Stephanie D’Alessandro and Stephen C. Pinson, to pierce the legends that surround Man Ray, many of them woven by the artist himself. Some riddles remain unsolved. “We’ve spent years working on this and pulled in lots of experts and conservators,” D’Alessandro said. “But there’s still a lot that is a mystery. That is a wonderful thing about his work.”

The curators have brought together 64 rayographs with about 100 other works (including films and objects) by Man Ray that date from the artist’s most fruitful period, the late 1910s and 1920s. They suggest that the rayographs, although occupying the artist for a relatively short time, provide a key to understanding the entirety of his richly varied career.