When Objects Dream: Man Ray and His Art from Another World

When American artist Man Ray first published Champs Délicieux in 1922, the art world was shocked to learn a seemingly impossible fact about the portfolio’s 12 works: they had been produced without a camera. 

These “rayographs,” as Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky) called them, were created through the repeated exposure of film to light with objects physically layered on top. As the objects shielded some areas from being darkened under the light, regions of positive and negative space mimicked the silhouettes of what had been placed on the film. The results were the phantom-like outlines of familiar household items rendered hazy and alien.

In the era following the First World War, artists began wielding their creativity as a way to push the boundaries of what was expected of art. The aggression of wartime “anti-aesthetic” Dadaism soon gave rise to Surrealism, a movement that emerged in Paris and aimed to capture an unconscious consciousness through art. Man Ray’s works created a foundational technique and became a key source of inspiration that swept him to the forefront of the early Surrealist movement. The acclaim of his rayographs also contributed to shifting public perception of photography towards considering it a form of art, not just documentation. Though Man Ray is best known for his rayographs, When Objects Dream showcases the range of media he used throughout his career, including painting, sculpture, short films (or “cinepoems”), and collage. 

When viewers enter the dark foyer of Man Ray: When Objects Dream, an exhibit on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through February 2026, they are met with all 12 of the original rayographs published in Champs Délicieux. The room is all black with white writing, mirroring the way the photographs blur and engulf bright focal images in darkness. The introductory writing on the wall explains how the exhibit hinges on the rayographs, which allowed Man Ray to explore the relationship between objects and interpretations. Each work’s strangeness is home to something powerful and reflective.

Through the dark entryway, visitors walk through two white rooms that hold Man Ray’s earlier works of art. Most of the pieces were produced during his years in New York and reflect city life through his abstract lens. On one wall, a print titled Fire Escape and Umbrellas (1917) depicts four stories of a classic NYC fire escape in delicate, sketchy lines. The image is immediately recognizable at first glance, but suddenly fades into disconnected, unrecognizable shapes as one’s gaze focuses. Next to it, a spindly egg beater plays a similar trick in The Egg Beater (1923). 

Man Ray considered himself a painter above all else for most of his career, even though his paintings were not what he was known for. On a far wall, a small photograph of tattered sheets blowing behind his apartment on West 8th Street served as the reference for a larger painting of the scene, rendered in textured yellow and blue oil paint. 

The rest of the exhibit, two large rooms painted black from floor to ceiling and three smaller rooms with white walls, is dedicated to the work Man Ray produced after moving to Paris. Here, a huge fleet of rayographs hangs in rows on dividers at the room’s center. On a long, glass-topped table, viewers can see actual rolls of film exposed as rayographs, the nails and tacks Man Ray used in their composition, and the resulting photographs developed from the film. 

Beyond his rayographs and paintings, Man Ray was also heavily involved in the fashion scene, where he was often hired as a photographer for clothing lines or brand advertisements. In accordance with this, Man Ray became fascinated with exploring depictions of female nudity, often using the body to explore the line between personhood and objecthood. Playing on one gallery wall is a film showing French model Kiki de Montparnasse rotating back-and-forth as her naked, headless torso becomes a canvas for the warped shadow of a lace curtain. On an adjacent wall hangs Le Violon d’Ingres (1924), a photograph that happens to hold the record for the most expensive work of photography ever sold at auction. Le Violon d’Ingres, another depiction of Montparnasse, transforms her nude back into the shape of a violin by painting the instrument’s f-holes along her spine. The title is a play on words, a phrase in French also referring to a “hobby.” The photograph itself alludes to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s painting The Valpinçon Bather (1808) as Man Ray refers to Montparnasse—his lover at the time—as his hobby. 

Though black and white photography is often associated today with seriousness, Man Ray’s sense of humor ripples throughout the exhibit, from the silly mannerisms of the actors in his cinepoems to the arbitrary subject matter of his rayographs. One collage that stands out for this reason was made as Man Ray was in the process of moving to Paris. It depicts a picture of grimy New York streets, a piece of mail stamped with the words “Trans Atlantique,” and a cut-out from a map depicting the neighborhood Man Ray was moving to in Paris. This joking, physical depiction of his relocation adds a new dimension to the way he used art as a form of expression.

To leave the exhibit, visitors must exit through the way they came: walking past the 12 original rayographs once more. Having finished the show, these images transform: no longer just photographs, they become representations of the artistic climate in which they were produced, and of the painter who discovered a new medium almost by accident. Outside the gallery, Greek statues and ceramics sit bathed in the bright overhead lighting of the Lamont Wing. Looking back into the darkness, the 12 rayographs appear even more bizarre beside the classical foundations of Western art. Though house keys and springs are all they really are, the rayographs look planetary and medical, like early pictures of the solar system or X-rays of broken bones. In the preface he wrote for Champs Délicieux, Tristan Tzara wrote that “these are the projections surprised in transparence, by the light of tenderness, of objects that dream and talk in their sleep.” These words stress what the exhibit makes clear: even as Man Ray’s composition was reduced to shapes and shadows, an unmistakably living essence still pulses through every image.