Rosemonde Wilms
Silver gelatin print
9h x 6 1/2w

Estimate: €12,000 - 18,000

Rosemonde Wilms, Réflexions d'une innocente, Paris, 1935 (frontispice).

This print is in excellent general condition. With a few spots of retouching visible in raking light only.
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The present photograph is a highly accomplished example of solarisation, made at the height of his mastery of this technique. This portrait of the writer Rosemonde Wilms, the nom de plume of Rosemonde Gion de Romesnil, was created for her 1935 book Réflexions d'une innocente. Man Ray presents his subject in profile, her striking features accentuated by the dark outline against the neutral background.

Also known as the Sabatier effect after the French photographer who popularized it in the 1860s, Man Ray discovered solarisation by chance in 1929. In the process of developing a film with Lee Miller (fig. 1), she was startled by something that crawled over her foot in the darkroom and turned on the light. Expecting the negatives to be ruined, Man Ray “was astonished the following day on re-examining the negatives, that they were partially reversed with a clear zone which would form a black line separating the most contrasting values.” He recalled: “I went seriously to work and did a number of portraits and nudes in this manner getting better control of the process. It was beautifully suited to certain subjects, not any subject. Of course, I was immediately accused of performing another trick, or even of working over the negative by hand.” (Man Ray, “Is Photography Necessary?”, Modern Photography, vol. 21, no. 11, November 1957, p. 124)

Man Ray used the technique of solarisation to create mysterious, otherworldly images. “By altering in varying degrees the relationship of dark and light tones, introducing elements of the photographic negative into the positive print, [solarisation] creates a strange effect of cloisonné, which visually walls off part🍷s of a single space from one another, establishing in this way a kind of testimony to a cloven reality.” (Washington, D.C., 1985, p. 28) For Man Ray, “the technique enabled me to get away from photography, to get away from banality, and here was a chance to produce a photograph that would not look like a photograph.” (1964 interview, quoted in Schwarz, 1977, p. 282)

The Surrealist character of this photograph is further emphasised by Man Ray’s ability to use the camera to distort the sitter’s anatomy, for in printing, the flawless ivory skin of the subject’s shoulder has been flattened to create an elongated neck, dramatically altering the viewer’s perspective of her body. The focus of the portrait shifts from the sitter’s face to her anatomy. This combination of solarisation and distortion is clearly evident in Man Ray’s series of nudes of Nusch Eluard made in the mid-1930s to illustrate Paul Eluard’s volume of poetry Facile. Like 𝔉the present work, these images were modern and highly innovative, exemplary of Man Ray’s unparalleled contribution to the development of the art of photography.

Fig 1: Man Ray, Lee Miller (solarised portrait), circa 1930, silver print (The Penrose Collec🎀tion)