Getty Museum
"L'Inquietude"
Creator
Man RayAmerican Photographer · 1890–1976
All works by this person →Born in Philadelphia, Emmanuel Radnitsky grew up in New Jersey and became a commercial artist in New York in the 1910s. He began to sign his name *Man Ray* in 1912, although his family did not change its surname to *Ray* until the 1920s. He initially taught himself photography in order to reproduce his own works of art, which included paintings and mixed media. In 1921 he moved to Paris and set up
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1920
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
One of Man Ray's guiding principles was "to do the things that one is not supposed to do," and here it seems he has used the camera to make a picture of something intangible, an emotion. Man Ray explored photography's potential in the realm of abstraction, photographing a cloud of smoke gathering around a found-object sculpture in his New York studio. By manipulating his camera, he blurred the subject beyond recognition and created a sense of velocity and disequilibrium. The enigmatic title denies the existence of a recognizable subject in the photograph. Unknown to the viewer is the fact that *Anxiety (L'Inquietude)*is the name of the sculpture in the photograph, making this a craftily anti-documentary document of the three-dimensional piece.
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