Photographer Man Ray was born on August 27, 1890, and died on November 18, 1976. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. His real name was Emmanuel Rudnitsky. He was the eldest of four children to a Jewish Ukrainian tailor, Melak, and a Jewish Belarusian seamstress, Minya. In 1904, he entered high school, studying drafting, mechanical engineering, and lettering. After graduating, he earned a living by creating designs for a publishing company and also worked as a painter. In 2011, he was influenced by the works of European avant-garde painters and the Ashcan School at the "Cézanne" exhibition held at 291, a gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York owned by photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, who was also a painter and curator. He decided to become an artist after seeing the exhibition. In 1913, Man Ray left his family home and moved to an artists' community in Ridgefield, New Jersey. In 1915, he met and married French poet Adon Lacroix. He began working under the name Man Ray, a contraction of his real name, Emmanuel Radnitzky. It was around this time that he mastered photography. That same year, he became friends with French artist Marcel Duchamp, whose avant-garde painting "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2" was a major influence on Man Ray's work. In October 1915, he held his first solo exhibition of paintings and drawings. In 1920, Man Ray helped Duchamp create "Rotary Glass Plates," his first optical device and a masterpiece of early kinetic art. He later published a one-off magazine with Duchamp, "New York Dada." The magazine, which featured Duchamp dressed as a woman under the cover, sparked the New York Dada movement and influenced many artists. The following July, he traveled to Paris during the École de Paris era and lived in Montparnasse, where he became fully involved in photography. In June of the same year, Duchamp, who had returned to Paris, introduced him to Parisian Dadaists André Breton, Paul Éluard, Louis Aragon, and Philippe Soupault. There, he met Kiki, a French singer and model who would later become his lover. He spent most of the 1920s with her, and his photographs of her as a model were published in fashion magazines and other publications. He made her famous as the "Queen of Montparnasse," and he himself became a successful professional photographer. He also met Alexey Brodovitch, a Russian photographer and assistant director at Harper's Bazaars who was known as "the greatest art director of the century." Together with Brassai and Henri Cartier-Bresson, they created the genre of "fashion photography." Brodovitch was also the first to come up with the idea of using photographs and advertisements on two pages. By this time, Man Ray's fee for a single shoot could reach 1,000 francs.

In 1929, after breaking up with Kiki, he began a relationship with Lee Miller, a surreal photographer and his assistant. The giant lips floating in the air in Man Ray's famous "The Lovers" are a representation of Lee Miller's own lips. As a professional photographer, his early clients were primarily Surrealists like Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. He gradually became popular and photographed many important members of the art world, including James Joyce and Jean Cocteau. He also participated in their exhibitions, exhibiting works such as Man Ray's iconic "Object to be Destroyed" and "Ingres' Violin," in which Kiki's nude body resembles a violin. During his stay in Paris, Man Ray also produced experimental silent films with Duchamp and others. His first work, "Return to Reason," released in 1923, has been described as the cinematic equivalent of Dadaism. Instead of using a camera, he projected a disjointed collage of images, created by sprinkling salt and pepper directly onto the film. He also left behind visual poems, such as footage of himself playing chess. In his later years, with the outbreak of World War II, Man Ray left Paris for Los Angeles. Soon after, he met Juliet Brauner, a professional dancer and art model. In 1946, the two held a joint wedding ceremony with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, who had also moved to the United States. In 1941, he began focusing on oil painting. He rarely took on photography, instead concentrating on rayographic experiments and the creation of objets d'art. However, his work was not well received in the United States, where Abstract Expressionism was becoming popular. In 1951, he returned to Montparnasse, Paris. Around this time, he also became fond of Japanese sculptor Aiko Miyawaki, and actively photographed her portraits. In 1963, he published his autobiography, "Self-Portrait." He died of a lung infection on November 18, 1976, and was buried in a cemetery in Montparnasse. His epitaph reads, "Disengaged, but not indifferent," in accordance with his wife Juliette's wishes. In July 2010, a Man Ray exhibition was held at the National Art Center, Tokyo. The exhibition featured approximately 400 works from the collection of the Man Ray Foundation, which Juliette established during her lifetime and which holds the copyright to all of his works.