30/05/2022
Fashion photography's reluctant poster boy
When is a fashion or beauty image art? Cath Pound explores the remarkable work of the legendary artist whose ‘strangeness’ raised the status of the medium.
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The name Man Ray springs instantly to mind when considering the most innovative photographers of the 20th Century. His rediscovery of the techniques of Solarisation and Rayography and his inventive use of close cropping resulted in some of the most iconic images ever produced in the medium. But it is often forgotten that for two decades he worked almost exclusively as a fashion photographer. Although dismissive of this work, which he saw primarily as a way to fund other artistic endeavours, his ground-breaking compositions for the likes of Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar transformed a previously staid and rigid format into an artform – and produced images that, removed from their original context, have become legendary.
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In the early decades of the 20th Century, fashion photography was practised by only a small number of specialists who frequently found it challenging to compete with the illustrators who dominated the fashion press of the era. “Reproducing photographs was still very difficult and expensive at the time,” explains Catherine Örmen, co-curator of an exhibition on Ray’s fashion photography at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris. In addition, illustration could neatly portray a trend, and reproduce details that the technical limitations of printing photographs in magazines made problematic.
