‘Man Ray et la Mode’ – An exhibition on fashion photography
Following a class discussion on fashion photography that took place in the Fashion History and Mediation course instructed by Professor Antoine Bucher. Year 1 students had the opportunity to attend the exhibition “Man Ray and Fashion” taking place in Le Musée du Luxembourg located in the 6th arrondissement of Paris.
The multimedia exhibition, curated by Catherine Örmen and Alain Sayag (co-commissaires de l’exposition), helped the students gain a broader perspective of how the relationship between fashion and photography has evolved over the passage of time and also to understand how fashion was portrayed and conveyed by a media that would soon become predominant in the fashion system.
Man Ray, who arrived in Paris in 1921, and was looking for a way to make a living, started to become involved in the art of photography, initially portraying his closest social circle, including Alice Prin also known as “Kiki de Montparnasse”. He was then introduced to the Parisian world by Gabrièle Buffet-Picabia, a French critic and writer commonly linked to the Dada movement. Immersed in a Parisian way of life he started to portray women whose life was interwoven with haute couture, like Peggy Guggenheim and Nancy Cunard among others. It would be through these women that Man Ray would start getting in touch with the fashion world. His first commissions in the fashion industry date back to 1922 but it would be after the invention of the technique of ‘solarization’, with the help of Lee Miller, that he would be hired by American magazine Harper’s Bazaar in 1933.
In the period between the wars, the printing press was the main publishing medium for fashion, and photography played a crucial role in this aspect. Photography started to gain ground in these magazines alongside illustration. Thiswas thanks to figures like Man Ray, who pioneered a new way of portraying not only clothes but fashion, regularly adorning a woman’s body to depict her feminine sensuality. Although in 1940 he abandoned both photography and Paris to start a career in painting in the United States of America, his contributions to the field of fashion photography will remain.
This exhibition was of great interest to our M.A. Fashion Studies students who are in the process of deconstructing the field of fashion photography in order to understand how fashion has been interpreted and represented throughout time.