Man Ray Experiment

In this image I have tried to attempt to replicate Man Ray's work specifically his double exposures. Man Ray in his work would have had to use film/analogue camera to take his images rolled his film back and then taken photos on the same film to get these double exposures but with my images instead of using a film camera I have photoshopped the images to give it the effect that they were taken on a film camera. With this double exposure however there are no contact sheets as these were just a couple of photos which I took while sitting at a coffee shop and these people were not aware that these photos were being taken. 

To create my Man Ray double exposure I simply added the two images below into photoshop and added a black and white filter over the top to keep to the style of Man Ray. I then started to create the double exposure part of the image by moving around the images and the opacity until I felt happy with the composition of the image. After I had done this I picked one of the layers and inverted it as I felt the image didn't look quite look like that of Man Ray's yet and this finished it off.

Here are the original photos that were taken:

Artist Research - Man Ray

Man Ray's career is distinctive above all for the success he achieved in both the United States and Europe. First maturing the the centre of American modernism in the 1910s, he made Paris his home in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the 1940s he crossed the atlantic once again, spending periods in New York and Hollywood. His art spanned painting, sculpture, film, prints and poetry, and in his long career he worked in styles influenced by Cubism, Futurism and Surrealism. He also successfully navigated the worlds of commercial and fine art, and came to be a sought-after fashion photographer. He is perhaps most remembered for his photographs of the inter-war years, in particular the camera-less pictures he call 'Rayographs', but he always regarded himself first and foremost as a painter.

Although he matured as an abstract painter, Man Ray eventually disregarded the traditional superiority painting held over photography and happily moved between different forms. Dada and Surrealism were important in encouraging this attitude; they also persuaded him that the motivating a work of art was more important than the work of art itself. 

For Man Ray, photography often operated in the gap between art and life. It was a means of documenting sculptures that never had a independent life outside the photograph, and it was a means of capturing the activities of his avant-garde friends. His work as a commercial photographer encouraged him to create fine, carefully composed prints, but he would never aspire to be a fine art photographer in the manner of his early inspiration.

Andre Breton once described Man Ray as a 'pre-surrealist', something which accurately describes the artist's natural affinity for the style. Even before the movement had coalesced, in the mid 1920s his work had surrealist undertones and he would continue to draw on the movement's ideas throughout his life. His work has ultimately been very important in popularising surrealism.

Though often shadowed by his lifelong friend and collaborator, Macel Duchamp, Man Ray played a major role in Dada and Surrealist movements in America as well as in Europe. His multiple attempts to promote avant-garde art movements in New York widened the horizons of the American art scene. His serious yet quirky imagery has influenced a broad audience through different iterations of his work in culture. Many of his important works were donated to museums around the world through a trust set up by his wife before her death in 1991. Most importantly, his process-oriented rt making and versatility have influenced a number of modern and contemporary artists, from Andy Warhol to Joseph Kosuth, who like Ray strove to continually blur the boundaries between artistic disciplines.

Jerry Uelsmann Experiment

In order to create the same effect as Jerry Ueslmann, I have taken two different photos and photoshopped them into a double exposure. To do this I have over sandwiched the image of the tree bend two duplicate layers on hands and then used the eraser tools on the top layer with varying opacity to reveal and blend together the two images. I chose to see keep the image within the hands in colour as I think with these two photos in particular that the colour allows you to view more detail in the photo than if it were in black and white it starts to loose detail and also it isn't as visible against the hands as I would have liked it to be.

This technique of editing is definitely something I am going to consider using in my final piece as it is a really effective way of viewing an image and also links in well with the truth, fantasy and fiction.

Contact Sheets

Artist Research - Jerry Uelsmann

Born in Detroit on June 11, 1934, Jerry Uelsmann received his B.F.A. degree at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1957 and his M.S. and M.F.A. at Indiana University in 1960. He began teaching photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1960 (“my first job offer”). He became a graduate research professor of art at the university in 1974, and is now retired from teaching. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Uelsmann received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1972. He is a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, a founding member of The Society of Photographic Education and a former trustee of the Friends of Photography. Uelsmann’s work has been exhibited in more than 100 individual shows in the United States and abroad over the past thirty years. His photographs are in the permanent collections of many museums worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Bibliotheque National in Paris, the National Museum of American Art in Washington, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Gallery of Canada, the National Gallery of Australia, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Galleries of Scotland, the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto.