Getty Museum

[Calla lilies]

Date

1930

Medium

Solarized gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

Object ID

2747f2af-da81-48bc-8aa5-7be9598782ff

*Something crawled across my foot in the darkroom and I let out a yell and turned on the light.* Thus began Lee Miller, Man Ray's artistic collaborator and lover, in a 1975 interview recalling her version of how the two artists discovered the solarization process. Miller continued, "I never did find out what it was, a mouse or what. Then I quickly realized that the film was totally exposed: there in the development tank, ready to be taken out, were a dozen practically fully-developed negatives of a nude against a black background . . . Man Ray grabbed them, put them in the hypo, and looked at them later . . . The background and the image couldn't heal together, so there was a line left which he called 'solarization.'" While working with Miller, Man Ray made numerous photographs exploring the effects of tone reversal in solarization. This image, part of a series of calla lilies, shows the thin black line that separates areas where reversal has occurred from areas where it has not.

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