The J. Paul Getty Museum paperback photography series continues to offer value for money in their authoritative guides to highlights of a world-class collection. This book presents a selection of fifty images by Man Ray with full-page captions, including a rare three-colour carbon transfer print used in the December 1933 issue of the Surrealist journal Minotaure, his “Violon d’Ingres” and “Tears”; several Rayographs (compositions on photographic paper made without a camera); cliché verre (glass negative) drawings, nudes, still-lifes, solarised photographs (partially exposed to light at development or printing stage); self-portraits and portraits of Berenice Abbott, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Sinclair Lewis, James Joyce, Henry Miller, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, Tristan Tzara, plus a portrait variant of “Noire et blanche” (Kiki de Montparnasse with an African mask), a landscape version which recently fetched the highest recorded price for a photograph at auction. A small but desirable book, rounded out, as with other In focus titles, by an edited transcript of a colloquium, “A labyrinth of media: the photographs of Man Ray”, between Jo Anne Callis, David Featherstone, Merry Foresta, Weston Naef, Francis Naumann, Dickran Tashjian and Katherine Ware, assistant curator in the department of photographs of the museum, who also provides the introduction to and the extended commentaries on the pictures.
Weston Naef and Catherine Ware (eds), In focus: Man Ray photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (J. Paul Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 1998), 144 pp, 55 b/w ills, $16.95 (pb) ISBN 0892365110