The year 1922 was of seminal importance to Man Ray and consequently, to the next two decades and beyond of photographic experimentation and abstraction. From late 1921 or early 1922 through the rest of the year, Man Ray created his first substantial group of unique darkroom images which comprised his definitive contribution to the photography of the 1920s as his solarizations would in the 1930s. Although Man Ray's "discovery" of the photogram technique coincided roughly with Laszlo and Lucia Moholy-Nagy's first experiments with camera-less photography, neither he nor his Bauhaus affiliated contemporaries could claim to have invented the method. Of course, some of the first photographic prints and indeed the earliest experiments with light-sensitive materials employed the simple procedure of using objects in contact with sensitized paper to create the shadow images. Man Ray even followed a previous practioner, Christian Schad, who first lent an eponymous air to naming his results ("Schadographs"). It was Man Ray, however, with his "Rayographs", that would bring popularity and notoriety to the procedure.

Man Ray arrived in Paris in July, 1921 after having already aligned himself with Duchamp, Picabia and the Dada movement from his outpost in Ridgefield, New Jersey. Earlier that year he helped publish the single issue avant-garde magazine, New York Dada and Picabia had reproduced Man Ray's photographs in his mouthpiece, 391 (Perpetual Motif, p. 119). Dada however was always a primarily European phenomenon and Man Ray clearly belonged where its heart beat.

The first year in Paris established Man Ray artistically and socially within dada circles. The Rayographs were his calling card. Tristan Tzara, a leading proponent of dada in Paris took it on to spread the news of their creation among his dadaist friends (ibid, p. 178). Dr. Sandra Phillips writes further: Although he was experimenting with a new medium - light - thus making photography an appropriately modernist pursuit, his rayographs also had an offhand, deadpan element, a nagging, funny factuality - in other words, they were true dada emanations. (cf. Perpetual Motif, p. 180).

Tristan Tzara contributed the introduction to Man Ray's first book, the photographic portfolio, Les Champs délicieux in December, 1922. Rayographs had already been published, not only in Vanity Fair (as the Rayograph offered here is referenced to above) but for the first time in Ezra Pound's The Little Review, autumn, 1922 (see: Perpetual Motif, fig. 125, p. 153. This Rayograph is now in the collection of the University of Wisconsin). Several of the twelve rayographs in Les Champs délicieux (produced from copy negatives and tipped to page mounts, in an edition of forty) share elements with the Rayograph offered here: Man Ray's pipe, a drinking glass, a belt buckle and straight pin. Particularly prominent in these works is the theme of autobiography. Like leaves fallen from a nearby tree, these rayographs bear the strong imprint of the man from whom they were generated (op. cit., p. 181). With their often erotic nature as well, Man Ray's photograms are distinctly different from Moholy-Nagy's. As spontaneous creations they relate directly to Duchamp's "readymades" in that, although the objects employed were handy, they were chosen somewhat at random and through interrelation create a meaning independent of their actuality. When reproduced in Vanity Fair, the unique work offered here was captioned "Composition of Objects Selected with Both Eyes Closed.

There are nine untitled Rayographs from 1922 in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and two in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu.