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The Delicious Fields: Exploring Man Ray’s Rayographs in a

Digital Future

Dr Marcus Bunyan 2004

Published in The University of Queensland Vanguard Magazine: “Man Ray: Life, Work

and Themes”, 2004, Triad series #2, pp. 40 - 46. ISBN 0-9756043-0-9.

Abstract This paper investigates the conceptual ideas present in Man Ray’s ‘Rayographs’ in order

to understand how these ideas may have relevance within contemporary digital

technologies. The author examines his experiments with depth of field using a digital

scanner, particularly in a body of work called Chronos/ome from 2002.

Keywords Man Ray, Rayographs, depth of field, photogram, time, light, alchemy.

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Figure 1

Man Ray

Rayograph

1922

“Like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames these images are oxidized

residues fixed by light and chemical elements of an experience, an adventure, not an

experiment. They are the result of curiosity, inspiration, and these words do not pretend

to convey any information.”1

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I have always been fascinated by the work of the artist and alchemist Man Ray and,

perhaps subconsciously, his art has influenced my own investigations.2 Like Joseph

Cornell of a later generation, Man Ray saw the world through a different lens, or no lens

at all. He created tangible dreamscapes, photographs that exposed latent images within

the photographic paper, images that were captured by light. After studying with Alfred

Stieglitz in New York, Man Ray arrived in Paris and tried to rid himself of the shackles

of straight photography.3 Man Ray knew and admired the work of Eugene Atget who

photographed the parks, doors and laneways of old Paris from the turn of the century

until 1927, when he died. Atget sold his photographs to make a living, and he was not

regarded as an artist until after his death at which time Bernice Abbot, a friend of Man

Ray, saved his archive of glass plates from destruction. Atget is now recognised as one of

the true masters of photography. He imbues within his photographs an extraordinary

sense of space and distortion of time. “Atget’s images reverberate (retentir), in

Minkowski’s sense of the word, with an essence of life that flows onward in terms of

time and space independent of their causality.”4 His images propose an almost chimerical

surrealism, the ‘surreal lyricism of the streets’.5

I remember this sense of space most clearly evidenced in a body of Man Ray’s

architectural photographs of Paris exhibited at the Pompidou Centre. The date of the

exhibition escapes me. What I do remember are small (no bigger than 4” by 5”) black and

white photographs of Parisian buildings that had an incredible presence in their spatial

construction. I have never seen these photographs reproduced in a book, yet I regard them

as some of the greatest masterpieces in photography. These architectural photographs

have a lot in common with the construction of the Rayographs. Both types of photograph

rely on the skill of the artist but seem to deny his existence, the photographs revealing

themselves to the viewer without the ego or the hand of the artist being present. As Mark

Greenberg has noted,

“The Rayographs carried even further [the] refutation of the artist’s role in image making

by allowing the objects arranged on the paper to be “drawn” by the action of light rather

than by the human hand.”6

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Figure 2

Man Ray

Rayograph

1922

The Rayographs Although not the inventor of the photogram, a photograph made without the use of a

camera by placing objects directly onto sensitised photographic paper and then exposing

the paper to light, Man Ray’s Rayographs have become the most recognisable and

famous form that photograms have taken. This is because of their inventiveness, their

subliminal connection to the psyche, and the use of “objects from the real world to make

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ambiguous dreamscapes.”7 It is interesting that Man Ray called his images Rayographs,

for a graph implies a topographical mapping, a laying out of statistics, whereas Lucia

Moholy and László Moholy-Nagy’s photograms imply in the title of their technique the

transmission of some form of message, like a telegram. The paradox is that, as the first

quotation at the beginning of this text states, Man Ray always insisted that his

Rayographs imparted no information at all; perhaps they are only dreams made

(un)stable. Contrary to this the other two artists believed that, “photographic images -

cameraless and other - should not deal with conventional sentiments or personal feelings

but should be concerned with light and form,”8 quite the reverse of the title of their

technique.

After his arrival in Paris Man Ray started experimenting in his darkroom and discovered

the technique for his Rayographs by accident. With the help of his friend the Surrealist

poet Tristan Tzara, he published a portfolio of twelve Rayographs in 1922 called Les

champs délicieux (The delicious fields). “This title is a reference to ‘Les champs

magnétiques’, a collection of writings by André Breton and Philippe Soupault composed

from purportedly random thought fragments recorded by the two authors.”9 The

Rayographs are visual representations of random thought fragments, “photographic

equivalents for the Surrealist sensibility that glorified randomness and disjunction.”10

Man Ray, “denied the camera its simplest joy: the ability to capture everything, all the

distant details, all the ephemeral lights and shadows of the world”11 but, paradoxically,

the Rayographs are the most ephemeral of creatures, only being able to be created once,

the result not being known until after the photographic paper has been developed. In fact,

for Man Ray to create his portfolio Les champs délicieux (The delicious fields), he had to

rephotograph the Rayographs in order to make multiple copies.12

Man Ray “insisted in nearly every interview that the Rayograph was not a photogram in

the traditional sense. He did something that a photogram didn’t; he introduced depth into

the images,”13 which denied the images their photographic objectivity by depicting an

internal landscape rather than an external one.14 What the Rayographs do not deny,

however, is the subjectivity of the artist, his skill at placing the objects on the

photographic paper, expressed in their dream-like nature, both a subjective ephemerality

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(because they could only be produced once) and an ephemeral subjectivity (because they

were expressions of Man Ray’s fantasies, and therefore had little substance). Through an

alchemical process the latent images emerge from the photographic paper,

representations of Man Ray’s fantasies as embodied in the ‘presence’ of the objects

themselves, in the surface of the paper. Perhaps these objects offer, in Heidegger’s terms,

‘a releasment towards things’,15

“a coexistence between a conscious and unconscious way of perceiving which sustains

the mystery of the object confusing the distinction between real time and sensual time,

between inside and outside, input and output becoming neither here nor there.”16

Finally, within their depth of field the Rayographs can be seen as both dangerous and

delicious, for somehow they are both beautiful and unsettling at one and the same time.

As Surrealism revels in randomness and chance these images enact the titles of other Man

Ray photographs: Danger-Dancer, Anxiety, Dust Raising, Distorted House. The

Rayographs revel in chance and risk; Man Ray brings his fantasies to the surface, an

interior landscape represented externally that can be (re)produced only once - those

dangerous delicious fields.

The Chronos/omes “Computers ... lead us to construct things in new ways.”17

“Our experience of spatial contiguity has also been radically altered by digital

representation. Fragmented into discrete and contained units ... space has lost much of its

contextual function as the ground for the continuities of time, movement, and event.

Space is now more often a “text” than a “context.” ”18

My artistic work (see www.marcusbunyan.com) has consisted of a journey from classical

black and white, to colour, and digital photography through installation work that

combines photographs in 3D structures, such as digital images printed into paper planes.

At first my concern was to tell personal narratives about place, space, identity and

environment. In the last few years my artistic work has concentrated on the interface

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between identity, technology and the body. In my formative training I was influenced by

the work of artists such as Eugene Atget, Edward Weston, Minor White, and Man Ray.

During black and white photographic work I experimented rather crudely and briefly with

photograms, but this line of inquiry was not pursued.

Later, I started working digitally and began thinking about the depth of field of the

Rayographs and how the objects that Man Ray placed on the photographic paper were

less in focus the further they were from the photographic paper. How could this depth of

field, these delicious fields, be interpreted using the glass of the digital scanner in place

of the photographic paper?

Figure 3

Marcus Bunyan

Symbowl Seven

1998

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Figure 4

Marcus Bunyan

Symbowl Six

1998

My first images of a three-dimensional nature were of lawn bowls placed directly onto

the glass of the scanner (See Figures 3 and 4 above) exhibited with the hands of local

bowlers. The images were made for a solo exhibition called Symbowl in 1998 that

investigated socially and culturally constructed semiological systems that are continually

used in the making and reading of images, in this case the appearance and meaning of the

symbols etched within the bowls as images of identity.19 With all text digitally removed

the ‘symbowls’ become quite magical, the depth of field of the scanner making the

bowling balls oval in shape, the light of the scanner passing over the bowl seen as an eye

shape on its surface.

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In one sense these symbols are text and have very little context, for they float in the inky

blackness of digitisation, but in another sense they are quite the reverse, for they defy the

rush to quantification, the loss of information, through their alchemical presence; again, a

releasment towards things but in a different sphere. Perhaps the ‘ground’ that Vivian

Sobchack is talking about has shifted - not to the (virtual) “text” that she suspects but to a

different form of “context,” towards Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘becoming’20 and

Katherine Hayles ideas of pattern/randomness.21 (Pattern/randomness is a non-binary

concept that applies conditions of change & variation to the material world, conditions

that replace the binary opposition of absence/presence.)

Figure 5.

Marcus Bunyan

Untitled

2002

From the installation Chronos/ome

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In 2002, I started experimenting with the actual ‘travel’ of the scanner itself. The images

in the installation Chronos/ome22 (See Figure 4 above and more images of the

installation) continued my investigation into the man/machine interface. I sought to

image the spatio-temporal dimensionality of the scanner using the distortion of time/form

(literally ‘chronos/ ome’) in the travel of the scanner, using this (meta)physical time-

travel to construct a scrolling (non)narrative. All the images except one were constructed

by moving my hands in the air above the surface of the glass of the scanner as it

travelled, the fragmentation in the images caused by my hands moving and by the

scanner as it stopped and moved backwards before continuing. As Man Ray found with

his Rayographs, these images are very ephemeral; I was never certain what was going to

appear as the images ‘developed’ upon screen - the the latent image in the air above the

scanner, those delicious fields brought to consciousness by the ‘developer’: “oxidized

residues fixed by light,” stabilised by the computer.

Like Man Ray with his rephotographing of the Rayographs these digital images can be

reproduced but they can never be (re)produced again. Sometimes these images took up to

fifty attempts for the sometimes totemic aura of the objects to emerge, a synthesis of

space, time, man, and machine revealing a posthuman, where dreams and danger, text

and fluid context posit a noumenal future.

As Man Ray observes in the first quotation of this text, these images are images of an

experience, an adventure, and not an experiment. In this case they are fixed not by

chemicals but by pixels but they still evince a connection to random thought fragments,

dreams and consciousness at the time I made them - and for that they will always be my

dangerous delicious fields.

Dr Marcus Bunyan 2004

Word count 1,910

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Endnotes

1. Man Ray quoted in Janus (trans. Murtha Baca). Man Ray: The Photographic Image.

London: Gordon Fraser, 1980, p. 213

2. Notice I do not say photographer for I believe, like others, that Man Ray was more

than a photographer.

“He continually surpassed the limits of photography, and for this reason the designation

“photographer” is extremely inappropriate for Man Ray.”

Janus (trans. Murtha Baca). Man Ray: The Photographic Image. London: Gordon Fraser,

1980, p. 9

3. “The techniques with which he became associated - Rayograph, solarization, grainy

printing - marked attempts to find a way out of the straight approach he had learned from

Alfred Stieglitz back in New York and would never entirely abandon.”

Perl, Jed (ed.,). Man Ray: Aperture Masters of Photography. New York: Aperture, 1997,

pp. 11-12

4. See the editor’s note by Gilson, Etienne (ed.,) in Bachelard, Gaston. (trans Maria

Jolas). The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994, p. xvi

5. Perl, op. cit., p. 24

6. Greenberg, Mark (ed.,). In Focus: Man Ray: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty

Museum. Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998, p. 44

7. Ibid., p. 38

8. Rosenblum, Naomi. A World History of Photography. New York: Abbeville Press,

1997, 394

9. Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28

10. Perl, op. cit., pp. 11-12

11. Perl, op. cit., pp. 5-6

12. Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28

13. Greenberg, op. cit., p. 112

14. Greenberg, op. cit., p. 28

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15. “We stand at once within the realm of that which hides itself from us, and hides itself

just in approaching us. That which shows itself and at the same time withdraws is the

essential trait of what we call the mystery … Releasement towards things and openness to

the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a

totally different way...”

Heidegger, Martin. Discourse on Thinking. New York: Harper & Row, 1966, pp. 55-56

quoted in Baracco, Mauro. “Completed Yet Unconcluded: The Poetic Resistance of

Some Melbourne Architecture,” in van Schaik, Leon (ed.,). Architectural Design Vol. 72.

No. 2 (‘Poetics in Architecture’). London: John Wiley and Sons, 2002, 74, Footnote 6.

16. Bunyan, Marcus. Spaces That Matter: Awareness and Entropia in the Imaging of

Place (2002) [Online] www.marcusbunyan.com/writing/spaces-that-matter-a.html Cited

07/07/2004.

17. Turkle, Sherry. Life on The Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York:

Simon and Schuster, 1995, p. 26

18. Sobchack, Vivian. Screening Space. New York: Ungar, 1991, pp. 231-232 quoted in

Springer, Claudia. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. Austin:

University of Texas Press, 1996, p. 44

19. Bunyan, Marcus. Symbowl. Melbourne: Stop 22 Gallery, 1998. [Online]

www.marcusbunyan.com/symbowl/g.html Cited 07/07/2004

20. Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

London: The Athlone Press, 1988, pp. 238-239

21. Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,

Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p. 28

22. Bunyan, Marcus. Chronos/ome. Melbourne: Monash University Art Gallery, 2002.

[Online] www.marcusbunyan.com/chronosome/m.html Cited 07/07/2004