Man Ray

        The most difficult part of writing about Man Ray is trying to decide which work to discuss. He was a master photographer, painter, and filmmaker. His photographic nudes somehow seem to be steeped in both classical tradition and modernist aesthetics. He captures the curves and shadows of the female form like the finest master painters, while providing shocking new ways of looking at the body that literally defined avant-garde photography. For me, twentieth-century photographic art begins with Man Ray, with apologies to Stieglitz, Strand, and others.

        Of all Man Ray's photographs, his macabre 1932 photographs on suicide, including his self-portraits, are the most fascinating. For me, these photos have always been strangely positive images—not morose meditations suicide, but Man Ray’s wry comment on the rather silly ways we trap ourselves in ruts or self-destructive rituals of our own design.

        Although all three have very different meanings for me, for the sake of this blog entry I’ll just examine one—the first photograph of Jacqueline Goddard. It is reminiscent of a cigarette advertisement, as if the model is blissfully unaware of her collection of vices. As in an ad, she invites the viewer to follow her lead, in this case down a path of oblivious folly, smiling all the while. She seems comically blind to her own self-destruction (I’m thinking of celebrities like Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen as modern examples), even though we all see it quite clearly. Of course, the joke is on us: the implication is that each of us is largely blind to the causes of our own personal demons and hang-ups, which might be easily perceived by outside viewers. Yet, we all must persist with our metaphorical heads-in-the-noose. This idea is probably best summed by Beckett’s famous final line of The Unnamable: “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

        I read in a biography of Man Ray that he decided to take these photos one day in his studio in Paris after going through one of the most challenging and depressing periods of his life up to that time. By staging these scenes with such obvious props, Man Ray seems to be expressing the absurdity of our own self-loathing. Photography, as a ritual staging of the death of a moment (to borrow an idea from Roland Barthes), is a cathartic moment of release that counteracts the self-loathing. It is the process of generating art that allows the artist to "go on" by ritualistically and metaphorically ending one phase of life and moving on to another.