Man Ray Analysis

This is a photo gram made by man ray or rayograms as he called them. Ray produced his first photo grams after he came to Paris in 1921. He believed that he first discovered them as an accident in the darkroom However it seems likely that his discovery was prompted by artist Tristan Tzara. Man Ray named the results of his efforts “Rayographs”—a play on his name.
I think the theme of this piece could be Innocence because although it has a gun in the centre of the photo gram i believe that this is a toy gun because the bullet holder is not intact and the alpha block that surround it are childlike, they is also some kind of circle object which i believe could be a bouncy ball going with the theme innocence.However the theme could also be taken as violence as you could look at the alpha blocks as symbols of people and the gun plays a kinda on Russian roulette with them although the bullet holder is out perhaps these people do not know that and still play the game carefully.

The artist created this work using the photo gram process whereby he put objects underneath the enlarger machine and exposed it to the white light for an approximate time, By shortening or lengthening the time of exposure you can control how dark the background of the silhouettes are,The shorter the time, the lighter the shade will be so i would say he exposed his photo gram for about 10 seconds because the background it quite dark.Also looking at the alpha blocks you can see a slight shadow which shows movement, To do this he simply halved the time he exposed his print for and during that time moved his prints slightly and then exposed it for the remaining time to give the piece this shadowy effect.In fact looking at the whole piece as a whole it seems as if he has moved all the objects in the photo gram.

 This piece links into our lessons at the moment because we are ourselves producing photo grams and this piece of work has inspired me to use different kinds of objects and maybe to make my objects relate to each other so they can all link into one particular theme whether that be violence or innocence like man ray or another theme i choose to do.