But while Atget cautiously explored the borderline between one kind of reality and another, a photographer with his studio on the same street in Montparnasse was already pushing deep into the territory of the unreal. For Man Ray, the camera was not a machine for making documents, but an instrument for exploring dreams, desires and the medium’s unconscious mind.

“He was such a, a natural maverick in the photographic medium that he almost effortlessly discovered all these ways to be a photographer that no one had thought of before, and they were so perfectly in tune with the moment of Dadaism and surrealism. All these things like making photographs in the dark room just by sprinkling, scattering interesting objects on photographic paper, and then just switching the light on very briefly to allow the image, these objects to imprint themselves on the paper, and then just developing it out, no camera involved. He discovers this solarization process inadvertently in the late 1920s, and he makes people look as though their faces are made of aluminum, they become sort of as, sort of sleek and metallic as those mascots on the front of rather swish, fast cars. They become these super people, also slightly inhuman, slightly robotic.”

Man Ray got in on the ground floor of the surrealist enterprise, thanks to his friendship with the artist Marcel Duchamp, and an early encounter with one of his most seminal works.

“Duchamp had left dusts to gather on sheet of glass, on which he’d drawn various lines in lead, and this was a stage, one of very many stages in the production of what became Duchamp’s famous work, his magnum opus---The Large Glass. Man Ray had been asked to make some photographs of paintings. So Duchamp said ‘well, why don’t you practice on this, this sheet of glass?’ Man Ray was using quite slow film on a large plate camera, very small aperture. And they open the shutter, go for lunch, come back, close the shutter. And Man Ray processes the film that night, he says the negative was perfect.”

Dust Breeding, delights photography’s infinite capacity for ambiguity, unmocks its obligations as a sober recorder of reality.

aperture: In photography, the aperture of a camera is the size of the hole through which light passes to reach the film.
Use a small aperture and position the camera carefully.