Man Ray was a Dadaist who used photography to express his ideas. He displayed images in an abstract way that allowed people to see things differently than they would normally in their everyday life. In this image of the female violin to the left you can see where Ray is displaying a woman in a way one would not normally see her. The images on her back could have been double exposed or drawn on for the photograph. Here a woman is being used to reflect an object, an instrument. Looking at the image one may think the woman is the instrument but the intrument for what? Images such as this one and many others were capable of making people ask those questions. The same questions they asked themselves when they looked at artwork hanging in a gallery. Man Ray along with other photographers found new and radical ways of using photography to capture images of the world around them.
The image below of the woman with her hands to her lips is an abstraction of the body. The image looks simple but Man Ray chose how to represent this woman. He cropped out her face from the top of the lips up and cropped her body from the wrist down. The lighting on the face, the gesture of the hand are all intentionally and meant to say something to the viewer. Just as other Dadaist used things that were not constituted as art to make their own art, Man Ray used photography to make his art. He took a medium that was seen to only have mechanical qualities and made art with it.
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