Photographs by Man Ray 1920 Paris 1934.

£8,750 · Offered by Shapero Rare Books · No longer available

presentation copy Man Ray's first monograph, a presentation copy inscribed: 'à Marcel Duhamel - / les photos sont des objets à retardement / mais les plus durables - / with love / Man Ray'. ['Photographs are time-delayed objects, but the most durable ones.'] Marcel Duhamel (1900–1977) was a French actor and screenwriter, and founder of the Série noire imprint published by Gallimard, which issued hardboiled detective thrillers by authors including Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy, William R. Burnett, Ed McBain, Chester Himes, Lou Cameron, Jim Thompson, and Peter Cheyney. During the 1920s, Duhamel regularly hosted members of the Surrealist group, including Man Ray, at his house at 54 rue de Château in Montparnasse. It was here, according to André Breton, that they devised the game 'Exquisite Corpse', in which a piece of paper is passed from person to person, folded to conceal each previous contribution. Man Ray had hoped that royalties from the sale of this book would enable him to make a long-overdue trip back to New York. Photographs... was well received in France, but in the United States, the reception was distinctly less enthusiastic. Lewis Mumford wrote in The New Yorker that Man Ray had 'done almost everything with a camera, except use it to take photographs... photographing Calla lilies so that they will look like drawings by a second-rate academician.' Commercially, it was not a success. It is widely suggested that in an attempt to generate sales, the p

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.