Already in 1972, the National Museum of Modern Art had a major retrospective devoted to Man Ray. Like all exhibitions held in collaboration with the artist at that time, he extensively showed his creative activity and its fascinating diversity: paintings, collages, drawings, sculptures, assemblages, etc rayographs. In relation to the photographs, the other media were there in very small numbers. The current exhibition at the Centre Pompidou proposes therefore is the complementary part of the previous. The focus is on photography by bringing together hundreds of photographs, both masterpieces of unknown, or little known, aspects of his production: portraits of Dadaists and Surrealists friends, the celebrities of intellectual and artistic Paris, the Anglo-Saxon writers, creative photography Illustrative for surrealist magazines, nudes and rayographs but also views of Paris, the photo mode and commissioned portraits. Some of these blocks, unknown in original prints, have recently been drawn and will be shown for the first time. As for painting and objects, fifty highly selected pieces will give a renewed vision of success he has achieved in various moments of his life with fresh and inventive works. "I paint what cannot be photographed, I photograph the things that I don't want to paint ... I would rather photograph an idea than an object, and a dream rather than an idea." Man Ray's own words suggest the essence of his brilliant, original, and deeply influential photographic oeuvre. Taking up photography in 1915 for the purpose of reproducing his paintings, he earned money doing the same for others when he went to live and work in Paris in 1921. This led to one of the richest careers in the history of photography, ranging from portraits of celebrated artists, musicians, and writers such as Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie, Arnold SchÜnberg, T.S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein, to the pictures using light effects outside the camera for which he is famous (cliche-verres, rayographs, and solarizations). These photographs are among the most exciting and revealing manifestations of the profusely fertile artistic impulse which made Man Ray equally celebrated as a painter, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker. Besides many classic images, this book includes a huge number of photographs that have never been seen before, including portraits of Virginia Woolf and Antonin Artaud and a large selection of erotic pictures. They add up to a truly revealing look at Man Ray, whom Cocteau called "the great poet of the darkroom."