Man Ray (Emanuel Radnitsky)
[Artist, b. 1890, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, d. 1976, Paris.]
...isn’t it astonishing that a hundred years after the invention of photography, painters still persist in doing something which requires so much hard work and perseverance and could be done better and more quickly with a Kodak.
I have freed myself from the sticky medium of paint and am working directly with light itself.
(On “Rayographs,” his term for photograms.)
Look at this Avedon, he photographs famous people. I photograph people who were unknown and become famous later.
(Quoted by photographer William Klein)
A photograph is to a painting what an automobile is to a horse. A rider on his horse is a beautiful thing, but I prefer a man in an airplane.
Painting is directed by the heart through the eye. Photography is directed by the mind through the eye. But desire and love for the subject direct both mediums.
A certain amount of contempt for the material employed to express an idea is indispensable to the purest realization of the idea.
Were it not for the fact that photography permits me to seize and to possess the human body and face in more than a temporary manner, I should quickly have tired of this medium.
However rapidly I could paint, it was still drudgery after the instantaneous act of photography.
