Copyright@ 1979 by Paul Hill and Thomas Cooper

All rights reserved

Published simul taneo usly in Canada by
McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., Toronto
Printed in the Unite d State s o/ America
Designed by Cynthia Krup at
First printing, 1979

Library o/ Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Dialogue with photography.
!ncludes bibliographies and índex.
1. Photographers-Biograph.y. /. Hill, Paul,
1941- li. Cooper, Thomas ]oshua, 194-6-
1/1. Camera (Luce rne)
TR139.DS2 I 770'.92'2 [B] I 78-25851

The interviews in this book originally appeared in

Camera magazine, Lucerne, Switzerland, and were developed
with the editorial counsel o/ Allan Porter
 ManRay

(18 90- 197 6/A ME RIC AN )

Why dúl you take up photo graph y?

I was a paint er for many years befor e I becam e a photo g-
rapher. I boug ht a came ra one day becau se I didn' t like the
reproductions of my work done by profe ssion al photo graph ers.
At just about that time, the first panch roma tic plates carne out,
and you could photo graph in black and white , prese rving the
vaiues of the color s. I studi ed very thoro ughly , and after a
few months, I becam e quite exper t. What intere sted me the
most were peopl e, partic ularly their faces. lnste ad of paint ing
people, I began to photo graph them , and I didn' t want to
paint portra its any more . Or, if I paint ed a portr ait, I was no
longer intere sted in creat ing a likene ss. I finally decid ed that
there was no comp ariso n betwe en the two, photo graph y and
painting. I paint what canno t be photo graph ed, some thing from
the imagi nation , or a dream , or a subco nscio us impu lse. I
photograph the thing s that I don't want to paint , thing s that
are aiready in existe nce.
I had grown tired of paint ing. ln fact, as l've often said, to
master a medi um you must despi se it a bit, too. That mean s
that you must be so exper t and sure of yours elf in that medi um
that it is no longe r amus ing or intere sting to you- it becom es
a chore. So I began to paint witho ut using brush es, or canva s,
or paiette. I starte d paint ing with air brush es, an air gun, and
c~mpressed air. It was a wond erful relief to paint a pictu re
~ithout touch ing the canva s. I paint ed pract ically three dime n-
sdions hecause, with the air gun, if I want ed a thin line, I'd
hraw eIose to the surfa ce, and then if I want ed to mode l a
tde, I went movi ng in a third dime nsion . That was a mar-
8

ve _ou~ thing at the time; it reliev ed my depre ssion abou t

.
. II y s1nce
painting , espec1a .
I was be1ng attao ked so much f or
niy ah stract work. So it becam e anoth er medi um, and when I
had satisfied my curios ity, I would stop and perha
to painti ng for a wh1·1 e. ps go h k
ac
But I contin ued to make photo graph s reprod .
. ' ucing
work and doing portra 1ts of peopl e who carne into th rny
I hoped one day that I would be able to make a livine studi°·
it. All pup1·1 s as k t h e e1ass1ca
· 1 questl·on: "How do you gb out of
successful and f amou s.?" I' ve ta lke d to t h ousan ds of pupils
ecorned
t?ere's only o~e in ten thous and ~ho mi~ht make it. It requ:: s
time and pers1stence, and a certa1 n pass1on, a certain mania.

What has been your passion? What has been your mania?
Somelww, it seems that play is a very important part.
Well, it's all play. The motiv e? What am I after? The pursuit
of liberty , first. When they sai d I was ahead of my time, I said,
"No, I'm not, I'm of my time, you are behin d the times." But
I contin ued. I jumpe d from one thing to the other, or did two
things at the sarne time. I had my hands full, and that was
enoug h to keep me going. Then, when I carne to France, I
immed iately met all the young revolu tionar y crowd, the Dada-
ists and so f orth. I had broug ht a few works with me, and
they thoug ht my work was absolu tely in line with what they
were advoc ating. So I collab orated with them and we puh-
lished magaz ines and gave exhibi tions. I tel1 youngsters now,
"You are ali going back f orty or fifty years. Why don 't you
create a new movem ent of your own? Find a new name for it,
that's what you should do, not .go back to the past." l'm not ª
historian, I was always the worst in histor y class, a disgrace
to my instruc tor.

Did you feel isolated in Ameri ca because of the sort 0 / work

you were doing? d
For the most part. I began to paint and exhibi t a bit aro~nh
1912. My first hig show was in 1915, in a gallery on Fift
Avenue t h at was devote
d to young Amen·can pain · ters ' but
they just didn't know what I was drivin g at.

What was the name of that galler y? b"

Danielle's. Danielle was a prospe rous man who had ª ig
.
sa Ioon and a lot of money and a friend of mine poet-
-a y k
persuaded him to open an ' art gallery. The who Ie New or

10 / Man Ray
S hool became involved with it. They were all very nice people,
b et I was on an entirely differen t track. When I got out of
uhool and started thinking about what I wanted to do, I
~:cided that I must do the things that one is not suppose d to
do. And that has been my slogan.
I was invited to the Armory show in 1913, but at that time
I didn 't have anything I thought was importa nt enough to
exhibit. And when I saw the show, I was glad that I hadn't
participated. There were all the Cubist painting s of Picasso
and enormou s Picabia painting s, Ducham p's work, the riots
over the "Nude Descend ing the Staircas e." I said to Ducham p
one day, "You know, if you hadn't put the title 'Nude Descend -
ing a Staircas e' on the canvas, that picture would have passed
unnoticed the way the Pi cabias did." E ver since then, l've
always attached titles to my objects. They do not explain the
work but add what you might call a literary element to it
that sets the mind going. lt doesn't do it to everybo dy, but
the few people that I expect will respond to it do.

At that time, did you show your work to Alfred Stieglitz ?

Oh, yes, I used to go to Stieglitz 's gallery. It was a few blocks
away from the technica l publishi ng house where I made my
living as a draftsma n. Whenev er he had a new exhibitio n, I' d
rush up to his gallery during my lunch break. It was interesti ng
hecause here was a marvelo us photogr apher who had opened
an art gallery; he didn 't show photogr aphs, instead he showed
modero art. Around 1912, there was an exhibitio n of Picasso' s
collages -you know, a few charcoa l lines with pieces of news-
paper painted on; another time, there was an exhibitio n of
Cézanne's waterco lors-a whole unpainte d sheet, with just a
few touches of color. The white seemed to be part of the
painting, it had been done in such an artful way. I carne
around quite often, and Stieglitz and I got to know each other.
\_'\'e. talked a little bit, but I was very young then, and very
~im~d •too, and hadn 't gotten anywher e yet with my work. He
invited me to have a show at his gallery. I sai d all right, when
! have enough things, but I never did. I was just then getting
interested in photogr aphy, too, and I began to use it to repro-
~uce my painting s. I wondere d why Stieglitz was so intereste d
10
modero art, showing abstract things- Brancu si sculptur es,
Man Ray / 11
 -
. 's quick watercolors. I thought: Well he
Ro d 1n h I , cause h ,
hotographer and photograp y cou d not compete With e s a
p • tºng We never discussed it, hut I felt that he lllodern
pa1n 1 • · . d d Wanted
. photography the va1ue 1t eserve . He was a se . to
g1 ve h cession ·
ared to other photograp ers, and the idea of Ist
comP I d secedin
or revolting had always appea e to me. I was a revoluti g
. onary
And so I went on, more an d more determ1ned to do ali th~
things that I was not supposed to do. When I carne to Pa .
I was told I should stick to painting. Stieglitz told me to ::~
for support from a rich coai haron who had hought one
two of my paintings at an exhibition. This man was very ni::
and immediately gave me a check, saying that he would he
in Paris the f ollowing year and would see what I had clone.
I o:ffered him some paintings, but he said, "No, I want to see
your new work, and I'll take it out of that." When he carne
the next year and saw that I was totally involved in photog-
raphy and making thousands of dollars, he said, "Oh, no,
you're an American. Y ou must go back to America. You
mustn't stay in Paris and you mustn't give up your painting."
I told him that I didn 't plan to give it up, I had lots of time
for painting. I only worked two hours a day at photography,
and that was enough. But sometimes I would work ten hours
a day in the darkroom, because, when I started, I was fasci-
nated by optics and chemistry and would do everything myself.
People ask: "What camera do you use?" I say: "You don't
ask an artist .what paints and brushes he uses. You don't ask
a writer what typewriter he uses." Anyway, I regard the
camera as an aid, in a way. Many painters, especially nowadays,
sta_rted using a camera-like W arhol, or even Ingres, who
painted all his nudes secretly ( he would make daguerreotypes
fr~m which he drew his nudes). AII the nineteenth-century
~ainters were against photography, because they were afraid
11 would take their hread and hutter away from them. Once,
Ingres was asked what he thought ahout photography, and he
answered: "I think it's wonderful, hut you mustn't say so!"

rou_ have. said that you were a revolutionary even within your
;mily. Did your family have an interest in art at all?
one. The fact was, I wanted to paint it was a passion, I was
mad about paint·ing. I d on ,t kn ow where
' I 1nher1ted
• · · or h ow
1t,
12 / Man Ray
 were blacksmiths, they were a force, a Goya or a U
cce1]
even a Manet, la ter on. Wh y, t h ose men used a hrush lhe0 , or
a hlacksmith would handle a hammer. lVay

/ s there anything at all that's related to photograph .

~ Y zn the
work you are doing now.
Everything is rel~ted to photography, hecause it ali has to he
photographed in the end. There are half a dozen hooks d
catalogues of mine with color reproductions, and everyt~:
is there-rayographs, photographs, hlack-and-white rayo!
graphs, color reproductions.

W hat work are you doing now?

Well, it's a secret, hecause I don't like to show the things Ido
immediately, sometimes I wait years. There have heen large
exhibitions of all my graphic work, lithographs and etchings,
hut this is a sort of panorama from my early work. Here, in
Paris, they accept everything I do, there is no hesitation at
all. But some of the American publishers want to change
things; they want to take this out or put something else in.
I say: "This is my work. If you want to do something different,
sign it with your name, create something, but don't try and
change my work."
I never touch a camera myself, any more than a movie
director does. People say: "Do you take the photographs
yourself?" Always. Even if somebody else pushes the hutton,
I take the photograph. Y ou don 't ask an architect whether he
huilt the building himself, you don 't ask a composer whether
he plays the whole piece himself. I have enjoyed the last year,
since I haven 't wanted to produce any more original work,
at least not for publication. The things I exhihit, the things
I reproduce, are works that have heen going on for the Iast
sixty years, they have no date. Some of the French critics are
very intelligent. One critic commented that all the things l've
been exhibiting, ali the reproductions l've published ( some
of which were clone forty or fifty years ago) could have been
donetoday!
There are no dates in my career. I have several mediums at

14 / Man Ray
 mY fingertips. Photogr~phy was just as incidental as painting
was, or writing, or mak1ng sculptures, or just talking. ln 1963
I wrote a book called Self-Portrait, at the instigation of an
editor in New York who wanted a book about the twenties and
thirties. I sai d: "Well, I started long before that and I finished
long after that. I'm still around, you see, so you can't really
fixa time. I'd have to start from the very beginning and go to
the very end." So, the book starts with my actual birth, and
ends with my return to Paris in 1951, after having spent ten
years in California during the war.

Where in California?
I lived right on Vine Street in Hollywood. I had a beautiful
studio there, in a courtyard with palm trees and humming-
birds and flowers. I forgot that I was in America at the time,
just as I forget now that I am in France. I live within my own
four walls, it's my life. I don't attach any importance to the
outside world. I think that a few people is all one needs for
companionship or acceptance. I can only deal with one or two
people at a time.
You asked me what I am doing now. Well, it is the sarne
thing that I have been doing ali my life. When I have a show,
people ask: "Is this your recent work?" One day I shouted:
"I have never in my life painted a recent picture." By living
my way, I have been able to emphasize my own personality.
I consider individuality the most importan t thing. ln a preface
to a catalogue for an exhihition in a museum, I wrote: "This
exhibition is not for the public, it is only for one person- for
you who are here." W ell, at first they thought that was a little
too tough. But finally they got it, they understood what I
meant. I never think of pleasing the public or arousing their
interest. I despise them just as much as they have despised me
through the years for the things l've clone.
I have heen accused of being a joker. But the most success-
ful act to me involves humor. ln America, for instance, much
of the Dadaist activity is like comic strips in the newspaper.
Theirs is provincial humor, apprecia ted only by the peo~le
immediately around them. It hasn't got the universal quahty
that the Europea n movements once had.
Man Ray I 15

Jllli.t.mf
 '\

Why did you return to Paris in 1951? .

fter ali I had spen t twen ty years 1n Paris hefore th
We11 ' ' me imposs1·bI e to stay w1t
a had beco . h the Ger e
war. It e and it was fortu nate t h at I d.d b rnans alI
1 go ack to Arneric. a.
d
aroun m , . .
• I'd have ende d up 1n a ,pnso n camp . The Gernians,
oth erw1s e,
e go after looki ng at my passp ort very carefully to see
Iet m ' . activities in
d w1t. h any of t he poI.Ihcal
that I wasn 't invol ve
France. I practically had to escap e.
I had a wonderful ti~e ~n California . I did a lot of pho.
tography and a lot of pa1n hng, and I was no longer workin
for anybody but myself. That had heen my ideal. I was ahl!
to do all the paint ings that I had heen plann ing for ten or
twenty years before-p ainti ngs I had neve r heen able to
realize. Some of them were from photo graph s of abstract
mathematical subjects, which I used hecau se they were man-
made, they were not from natur e.

That in itself is a rather revolutionary idea, isn't it?

Absolutely. But all those paint ings are gone now. I carne
to Paris in 1951 and found this studi o hy chance. I settled
down and started ali over again, a sort of second life. I painted
like mad from 1950 to 1960.

Dul, you become disenchanted with Amer ica?

Oh, no, it had nothing to do with that. I thought Hollywood
was a wonderful place. And when I stopped in New York on
my way back to America in 1940, they had set up a big studio
for me at Vogue or H arper's Bazaar. l was doing all their
fa~hion work, and celebrities, theatrical and movie people. I
s~id: Well, I've been through this terrible war, and need a
lTitthl~ _vacation now. I was really on my way to Hawaii and ·
a. h1ti ' I was gomg · t O d'1sappear. I had left the studio in Pans
w1t every.thi ng m · •
th' it, not knowing whether I'd ever see. the
mgs agam. A 1 t Of . .
cellar but I f do my pa1nt mgs were hidden away m a
back ~o ll ounh some of them seven years later when I 'came
co ·
ect t em· lt' s Just t h at I feel freer here that s aII·
There ' . . ' I
. s a proverb ah out ª prophet 1n h1s own country.
d1dn't want t b f
comfortable a~d ~ amous or anything, I just wanted to be
ave enough to live on and do my work.
16 I Man Ray
 I lectured a lot in Ameri ca, and was well pai d for that. I
had pupils in California, the wives of movi e produc ers who
had nothing to do and wanted to learn photog raphy or paint-
ing. J even _had ~ '":aitress who would come in her spare time
for Iessons m pamtm g. She becam e a good painte r and Iater
a professor of art in a univer sity. I was very successful as a
teacher, but I would n't teach formally. The Art Center in
California gave me an exhibi tion and tried to get me to teach.
I told them I was agains t educat ion. I could teach only a few
people, one at a time. l've always had one or two studen ts in
my studio in Paris learnin g photog raphy.

Bill Brandt carne to you, didn't he?

He was my pupil. He carne to my studio and asked if he
could study with me. I told him I couldn 't teach him anything,
but he could watch and help. He fiddled around a bit and
finally hecame a photog rapher , as Berenice Abbot t did. I had
three or four oth~rs, and they all are famous photog rapher s
now.

Did any other plwtographers come to see you, people like

Cartier-Bresson or Brassa~?
There is a snapsh ot by Cartier -Bress on of me and Duchamp,
taken just before Ducha mp died. We were sitting here over
a game of chess, and Cartier-Bresson took a snapshot. He sent
it to me when I had my last exhibition, saying: "If you need
a photog raph for public ity, you can use mine."

Can you explain your relationship with Atget?

I discovered him! But I don't consider that to my credit.
Atget lived a few doors from my studio in Paris in the twen-
ties. He had albums which he printed on a little frame, putting
it outside his window to dry in the back yard in the sun, and
as soon as he had the prints, he put them in a book. You could
goto him and buy a print for five francs, and then he'd replace
it. They were all the French size ( 18 x 24 cm.). I begged
him once: "Lend me some of your plates and I'll make some
·
prmts on mo d ern paper. " "Oh , no, " h e sai'd , "th at' s no t per-
manen t." His prints all faded if you exposed them to the light,

Man Ray / 17
because they were washed in salt water to fix them. They were
the kind of prints that photographers made as proofs for their
sitters so that they wouldn 't be kept as permanent things.
Anyway, I would drop in once in a ;"hile and pick up a few
prints. He had thousands of_ them: he d pho~ographed so much
in his Iifetime. But he sa1d he was mak1ng documents for
painters. He was a pain~er himself, he _painted landscapes. I
finally acquired about thITty or forty pnnts and gave them to
Beaumont Newhall. They're the ones that have been most
reproduced, because they have a Dada or Surrealist quality
about them.
Atget was a very simp-Ie man, almost na'ive, like a Sunday
painter, you might say, but he wor~ed every d~y. When _I had
a couple of his things reproduced 1n a Surreahst magazme in
the twenties-a crowd standing on a bridge looking at the sky,
at an ~clipse-he said: "Don't put my name on it. These are
simply documents I make." Y ou see, he didn't want any
publicity.

Did Atget explain why he didn't want any publicity? He was

living in very poor circumstances.
Very poor. He had no money. He had been an actor once, in
a traveling show, I think. I was away from my studio for a
few weeks on a trip down south when he died. At that time,
Berenice Abbott was my assistant. I had known her in New
York as a young girl of eighteen; she was a sculptress. She
had come to Paris a month or two before me. She was starving,
and I asked her to come and help me, because I was loaded
with work. AH the painters-Picasso, Braque, Matisse--were
asking me to photograph their work. When Atget died, she
went to his studio with her brother and got his collection of
negatives, which she was later able to publish in France. She
was very enthusiastic about it. She became a very good pho-
tographer after a couple of years with me and then went off
on her own.
I don 't want to make any mystery out of Atget at all. He
was a simple man, and he used the material that was available
to him when he started in 1900-an old rickety camera with
a hrass lens on it and a cap. I've taken photographs that way,
too, when my other cameras broke down. l've even taken

18 / Man Ray
 tographs without a lens on my camera. Once, I had to
Ph
O
•
hotograph a pa1nter an d I arnve . h my stu d.10 camera
. d w1t
:nd tripod and everything. I started to set up, but l'd forgotten
the Iens. I knew the size of my lens because I prescribéd my
own glasses, I knew optics so well. I knew that my lens had a
12-inch focal length, but of course I realized it would be a very
fuzzy picture. I had a roll of tape and taped my own eyeglass
Iens onto the opening in my camera and j ust let the black cloth
down, with a little hole in it, to diaphragm it. I opened the
cloth and let it down, and I got the portrait of Matisse-a
beautiful, soft-focus photograph with all the details visible.

Do you feel it is a burden to be a historical figure in the art

world?
It's a nuisance, an absolute nuisance. They drag me on tele-
vision and on radio, and there are newspaper and magazine
interviews. I discourage them as much as I can, of course. But
an artist has to rely on publicity, otherwise he can't have ex-
hibitions. I gave up photography professionally twenty years
ago, although when I feel like doing a portrait, I do one. I
make some prints, but not by myself. I have two or three
laboratories here in Paris, and they do wonderful work for
me. There's been so much progress in printing and the me-
chanics of photography, but there's no progress on the creative
side of it.
There are two or three collectors who have a couple of
hundred of my prints, and the Museum of Modern Art has
about 150. The Metropolitan had a traveling exhibition. I
wasn't there for it, but they sent me photographs-one from
Pasadena, one from San Francisco, one from Washington. I
get all the catalogues from the exhibitions of my work, and
sometimes the collector is a bit of a photographer himself,
so he s!ips in some of his own photographs, to see if he can
get noticed along with me. But that's a mistake: you should
never show your work with that of a master, it only makes
you look worse. I never show my works with painters who
a_re considered greater than I am. I want only one-man exhibi-
.
hons , 1·ust as I want a one-man audience !
April 1974

Man Ray / 19