Art historian and curator Emmanuelle de l’Ecotais has been researching the work of American visual artist Man Ray for more than 25 years. When asked about how his work might shape the way we see art today, she doesn’t just talk about his impact on painting or the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Instead, she first points to the popularity of his work in body modification even today.
“If you take Le Violon d’Ingres, for example, which is an image of the back of a woman with violin [sound holes on her body] … today, you can find women who’ve tattooed their own torsos to reproduce the image on themselves. That’s incredible,” she says. “This image Man Ray created 100 years ago is still alive.”
Man Ray’s photography is half the focus of a new exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art, along with the work of Australian photographer Max Dupain. Featuring over 200 works, it explores how both artists became quintessential modernists in their respective countries. The twist? They never met – separated by 20 years and different continents, they nonetheless had unexpectedly similar ideas about the potential of photography.
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Man Ray and Max Dupain sees the two artists’ photographs hung side by side, blurring the distinction between their individual work. “It’s really interesting to observe how those two are looking into each other, although they didn’t know each other,” she says.
Starting her career at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, de l’Ecotais put together an inventory of 15,000 photographic negatives and 5,000 contact sheets of Man Ray’s works, making her one of the world’s foremost experts on the artist. Heide’s artistic director asked her to come to Melbourne to collaborate on a new show about Man Ray, resulting in an exhibition that also focuses on how the way we think about photography as art has evolved.
Man Ray emigrated from New York to Paris in the 1920s seeking artistic freedom, and became known for controversial statements like “photography isn’t art”. “It was his way of saying, ‘I’m doing this by chance. Everything is so easy to do.’ He was playing a game of somebody who’s not working, who’s just having fun,” says de l’Ecotais.
But the reality was different: when you see Man Ray’s work up close, you observe thoughtful techniques like cropping, pose experimentation, and retouching. “He was hiding all these details of work. Max Dupain was the same, in his techniques and practice. They were both ‘living their medium’, which is photography.”
Man Ray’s work revealed contradictions: “It’s like, ‘click, clack, Kodak’, you push the button, and that’s it. But it’s also a kind of lie. It’s a kind of mystification of what photography is – really – because he’d work all night long to create these images. He just didn’t want to tell everybody, ‘I’m working hard!’”
Max Dupain, meanwhile, spent his life in Sydney, discovering Man Ray through international journals and magaines and the book Photographs by Man Ray 1920–1934. Like Man Ray, Dupain explored abstraction, nudes and fashion photography, often using superimposition to create layered images. He was also considered groundbreaking for being the first Australian photographer to comprehensively take the female nude as a subject. “He had a very original way of photographing the women, the skin and the body. There’s this direct and simple sometimes point of view on the body,” says de l’Ecotais.
Both artists were prolific and significantly impacted photography: May Ray with his European avant-garde approach and Dupain for his pioneering take on Australian modernism.
The exhibition also honours Man Ray and Max Dupain’s respective partners: Lee Miller and Olive Cotton, who were each accomplished photographers in their own right. Miller became a photojournalist and war photographer, while Cotton specialised in experimental photography, exploring landscapes, serial imagery, and flowers – blurring the lines between fantasy and reality.
“Miller began her career with Man Ray in the ’20s but left him in the ’30s and figured out how to become one of the best photographers of the 20th century after that. Cotton had a great relationship with Dupain, but no one really knew about her work.”
Visitors will see a mix of famous works and lesser-known pieces from the two artists: Man Ray’s aristocratic portraits and images of contemporaries such as Salvador Dali sit alongside Dupain’s pre-war nudes and Vogue fashion photography from when Helmut Newton was emerging in Australia.
“You don’t feel like they’re just old pictures. They’re still so incredibly beautiful,” says de l’Ecotais. “In the exhibition, all the images have their own personality, their own theme. The subject matter might have parallels, but they aren’t treated as the same. It’s a real pleasure to be able to witness these images in front of you.”
Man Ray and Max Dupain runs from August 6 to November 9, 2025. Find out more and get tickets at heide.com.au.
Broadsheet is a proud media partner of Heide Museum of Modern Art.