Man Ray created his first photogram – a photographic image made without a camera – entirely by accident. Late one night in the winter of 1921, he put some of his equipment on a sheet of unexposed photographic paper and noticed that an image was forming on the sheet – a distorted negative of the objects. The next morning he pinned the sheets on the wall, marking the start of a new and fruitful chapter in his artistic life. Some 60 of these ‘Rayographs’, as Man Ray called them, form the backbone of this exhibition at the Met (14 September–1 February 2026). The curators are keen to emphasise, however, how the photograms fit into the rest of his work: the display is organised into themes, such as dreams, games and the human body, in which paintings, films and assemblages appear alongside photograms.
Find out more from the Met’s website.
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