Man Ray at Palazzo Reale: when light ceases to “illuminate” and begins to think

4_Larmes 1932 © Man Ray 2015 Trust, by SIAE 2025

There are exhibitions that end the moment one steps out of the final gallery. And then there are others which—although officially “just concluded”—continue to unfold within us, like a photograph left too long in the fixing bath: the image does not fade; it changes state.

Man Ray. Forms of Light at Palazzo Reale belonged unmistakably to the latter category. It was not a retrospective designed as a checklist of masterpieces, but rather an optical machine—one capable of transforming Milan itself into a mental darkroom. With nearly 300 works on view—vintage photographs, drawings, objects, multiples, and archival documents—the exhibition was curated by Pierre-Yves Butzbach and Robert Rocca, with an exhibition design by Umberto Zanetti (ZDA) that seemed conceived to allow visitors to walk inside the very act of seeing.

The phrase that lingers, sharp as a drawing pin (and Man Ray delighted in making pins and nails dance even within his films), appeared almost as a warning:“I do not seek to be original, but to be true.”Here lies the paradox: for Man Ray, truth never coincides with realism. Truth is a condition of freedom.

Seven rooms as seven ways of becoming “light”

The exhibition articulated itself through a lucid structure: seven thematic sections—self-portraits, portraits, muses, nudes, rayographs, cinema, fashion (with multiples and readymades forming a Dadaist backbone). Yet the most compelling aspect was that these sections did not function as chapters. They functioned as filters. Each room recalibrated the sensitivity of the viewer’s retina, as though altering the parameters of perception itself.

In the self-portraits, Man Ray does not represent himself; he tests himself. The face becomes a laboratory—mask, disguise, reflection—a continuous training ground for identity.In the portraits, the dynamic reverses: it is not the sitters who submit to photography, but photography that becomes subject. Man Ray brings the Tout-Paris of the avant-garde—artists, writers, intellectuals—into the realm of serious play, where the image operates as a thinking device.

The section devoted to the muses—Kiki, Lee Miller, Meret, Nusch, Ady, Juliet—avoids any sentimental framing. These figures function instead as interfaces: bodies and presences through which photography becomes a site of negotiation between desire, power, imagination, and emancipation. As the catalogue makes clear, Man Ray’s life and artistic practice were mutually sustaining, and the female body often became the locus of ongoing experimentation, particularly through techniques such as rayography and solarization, which effectively “dress” the body with vision itself.

Thus the question is not the lazy one—what would Man Ray have done with AI?The real question is: are we, with AI, capable of being equally free? Capable of using technology not to produce more images, but to produce truer images—true in the Man Ray sense of the term.

6_Dora Maar, 1936 © Man Ray 2015 Trust, by SIAE 2025

Rayographs: the most contemporary gesture of the twentieth century

At a certain point in this narrative, Man Ray performs an act that remains startlingly current: he photographs without a camera. The rayographs—objects placed directly onto photosensitive paper—are images generated through contact, pressure, and shadow. Tristan Tzara may have coined the term, but it was Man Ray who opened the breach: photography no longer as capture, but as production.

Here emerges the first conceptual short circuit with Vertigine Studio’s core concerns (art, fashion, AI). Rayographs anticipate, in poetic form, what we might now call generation. There is no lens framing the world; there is a set of conditions, a sensitive environment, and an event of light. They operate almost as analog algorithms. Not in order to “explain” artificial intelligence through Man Ray—which would be reductive—but to recognize that he grasped something essential: the medium is not a container; it is a behavior.

9_Rayographie Le baiser, 1922 © Man Ray 2015 Trust, by SIAE 2025

When the image decides to move “incorrectly”

Palazzo Reale devoted significant attention to Man Ray’s films—a crucial choice, because in cinema he does not pursue narrative, but drift.Le Retour à la raison (1923) employs rayography in motion, exposing nails and pins directly onto film stock, transforming them into abstract choreography.Emak Bakia (1926) is an improvised “cine-poem,” devoid of script or narrative logic—a declaration of independence.L’Étoile de mer (1928), described as “a poem by Robert Desnos seen by Man Ray,” already reads like a manifesto for cross-media collaboration.Finally, Les Mystères du château du Dé (1929), commissioned to showcase Villa Noailles, plays with the contingency of chance (Mallarmé) and demonstrates that even a commissioned film can become a fully surrealist object.

3_Déshabillé en contre-jour 1935 © Man Ray 2015 Trust, by SIAE 2025

Where the avant-garde becomes wearable—without being tamed

In a city such as Milan, the fashion section resonates less as history than as an articulation of the present. Man Ray enters fashion obliquely, through Paul Poiret, and proceeds to transform it from within. He does not seek to photograph garments; he seeks portraits. His aim, as he himself stated, was to give “a human quality to the image.”

The expansion is almost inevitable: Chanel, Patou, Vionnet, Lanvin, and above all Elsa Schiaparelli, whose world was already permeable to avant-garde contamination. Man Ray’s photographs circulate in international magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

Here emerges the second short circuit with artificial intelligence. Today, fashion is one of the most intense arenas in which synthetic imagery is negotiated—AI-generated campaigns, impossible styling, virtual models, recombined archives. Man Ray reminds us, however, that true innovation lies not in special effects, but in mental positioning. He famously referred to himself as a fautographe—a playful deformation—suggesting: I do not photograph; I make photography. I construct it, sabotage it, reinvent it.

7_Marquise Casati. “Le portrait de mon âme”, 1922 © Man Ray 2015 Trust, by SIAE 2025

Man Ray as an analog prompt engineer

If one idea remains after Forms of Light, it is this: Man Ray did not work on photography. He worked on the conditions that make an image possible.

What we now describe, in the language of AI, as prompting, datasets, pipelines, and latent spaces—he enacted through shadows, objects, chemistry, time, and desire.His rayographs are prompts without words.Solarizations (developed with Lee Miller, turning contours into aura) are shifting parameters.His embrace of multiples and his rejection of uniqueness anticipate a critique of originality—an issue that today resurfaces forcefully in the age of generative images.

Thus the question is not the lazy one—what would Man Ray have done with AI?The real question is: are we, with AI, capable of being equally free? Capable of using technology not to produce more images, but to produce truer images—true in the Man Ray sense of the term.

Because in the end, Forms of Light did not celebrate a master; it celebrated a method of escape. An education in visual disobedience. An invitation to treat every medium—photography, cinema, fashion, artificial intelligence—as a surface to be scratched until something begins to pass through.

And that something is often a word that remains as radical today as it was in 1923: freedom.