Man Ray

Man Ray, born Emmanuel Radnitzky in Philadelphia in 1890, was an American painter, photographer, filmmaker and graphic designer. The son of a Russian immigrant family of Jewish descent, after rejecting a scholarship in architecture, he decided to devote himself to art: in 1908 he began working as a draftsman and graphic designer in New York, and in 1912 he began signing his works as "Man Ray." A close friend of Marcel Duchamp, he and collector Walter Conrad Arensberg founded the Society of Independents Artists, and in 1921 he moved with the former to Paris. When surrealism was born in 1924, Man Ray was the first surrealist photographer. After the outbreak of World War II, he was forced to flee to the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life, still making several trips to France. It was in Montparnasse that he passed away, in 1976.