Published to accompany an exhibition held Feb. 7-May 27, 2013, at the National Portrait Gallery, London; June 22-Sept. 8, 2013, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; Oct. 28, 2013-January 19, 2014, at the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

When American-born Surrealist Man Ray died in 1976, he left behind thousands of photo negatives, mostly portraits taken in his studio after his arrival in Paris in 1921. The Centre Georges Pompidou, which has owned them since the mid-1990s, has duly catalogued the collection of negatives and is now in a position to bring out what is an encyclopedic publication in the best sense of the term. It attests both to Man Ray s ability as a portrait photographer and to the quality of his archive as a monument to cultural history. The catalog features 500 portraits, each of which is explained in a short commentary. Since Man Ray's clientele was made up of members of Dadaist and Surrealist circles, of artists and painters, of writers and US emigrants of the Lost Generation, of aristocrats, and paragons of the worlds of fashion and theater, the book is at the same time a marvelous Who's Who and an indispensable reference work for a broad range of different historians and scholars of the 20th century.

“...Man Ray’s two decades of mutual love and admiration, between the two wars, with and within the dreams and realities of the Ville de Paris. Unlike such romantic tales, we have a vivid, visual record of all that its characters and great moments: Man Ray’s Paris portraits, hopefully brought back to life for you within these pages once again.” — author.

Man Ray, surrealist master and exponent of the Dada movement, managed to reinvent not only the photographic language, but also the representation of the body and face, as well as the genres of the nude and the portrait themselves.0This book brings together around 200 photographs produced from the 1920s right up to his death in 1976, all featuring female subjects. Through rayographs, solarisations and double exposures, the female body undergoes a continual metamorphosis of forms and meanings, becoming an abstract form, an object of seduction, classical memory or realistic portrait, in endless playful and refined variations. Among the protagonists of his shots are Lee Miller, Berenice Abbott, Dora Maar and Juliet, a lifelong companion, to whom is dedicated the amazing The Fifty Faces of Juliet portfolio (1943-1944). But these women were, in turn, great artists: as evidence is presented here a corpus of works dating back to the time - between the 1930s and '40s - of their most direct association with Man Ray and with the environment of the Dada avant-garde and Parisian surrealism.0This volume offers a wide survey of one of the most exuberant periods of the 20th century, with authentic masterpieces of photographic art such as the Electricite portfolios (1931) and the very rare Les mannequins. Resurrection des mannequins (1938).00Exhibition: CAMERA, Turin, Italy (17.10.2019 - 19.01.2020).

Still lifes, landscapes, nudes, women's faces, portraits, and rayographs (photographs made without cameras) produced by Ray in the twenties and early thirties are accompanied by the comments of his contemporaries

American artist Man Ray spend the most productive years of his career, during the 1920s and 1930s, in Paris.

Man Ray: Women~ISBN 88-89431-32-6 U.S. $49.00 / Hardcover, 8.5 x 11 in. / 152 pgs / 130 b&w. ~Item / March / Photography