On the occasion of Man Ray's retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1966, the German Dadaist Hans Richter contributed a catalogue essay in which he succinctly captured the creative vision of his friend of forty years: There is no eggshell, no thermometer or metronome, no brick, bread or broom that Man Ray cannot and does not change into something else. It is as if he discovers the soul of each conventional object by liberating it from its practical function. Further elaborating on the artist's practice, he noted that Man Ray 'just cannot help to discover and reveal things because his whole person is involved in a process of continuous probing, of a natural distrust in things being "just so"".
Over the course of a half-century creative career spanning two continents and two world wars, Man Ray's process of continuous probing was nowhere acutely manifested than in his idiosyncratic photographic practice. Playfully experimenting with dramatic use of light, shadow, perspective and framing as well as inventive techniques such as positive / negative reversal, double exposure and solarization, Man Ray pioneered conceptual approach to the medium that liberated it from steadfast orthodoxies by which it had been bound since its inception. His rejection of the conventional belief in photography as a transparent reflection of reality and his radical approach to image making generated new appreciation for the medium's potential as an art form and a vehicle for accessing what Walter Benjamin termed the 'optical unconscious'. In the words of Man Ray, photography 'is a marvelous explorer of those aspects that our retina never records'.
- Wendy Grossman, 'Liberating photography', in Nathalie Herschdorfer, Man Ray: Liberating Photography, London, 2024, p.10
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