Between you and me: Man Ray's Object to Be Destroyed - Cover Story

Miller moved to Paris in 1929 and introduced herself to Man Ray at the suggestion of photographer Edward Steichen. As a model who had already posed for Conde Nast and Vogue magazine, Miller quickly became a favorite subject of Man Ray's photographs. As Man Ray's "pupil," she also began to make photographs of her own. From 1929 until 1932, the two were romantically and professionally involved. A souvenir postcard from the time captures the couple in a characteristic moment--she looking striking, he taking aim. With a certain degree of premonition, Man Ray inscribed the card: "For Lee--this souvenir--hoping we shall always see eye to eye." In 1932, Miller left Paris and Man Ray for New York to open her own photography studio, then departed two years later to marry Aziz Eloui Bey in Egypt, where she stayed for only a few years. (29) She returned to

France temporarily in 1939, but settled eventually with Roland Penrose in England, where she continued to pursue a career as a photographer. (30) The few years that Miller spent with Man Ray were by all accounts tumultuous. Biographies written about each fill in details about violent episodes that Man Ray left out. Miller's son Antony Penrose aptly described how his mother's credo of sexual freedom disturbed Man Ray, even though her actions would have been deemed exemplary from a male artist: "The doctrine of free love had largely been constructed from a male standpoint. Lee exposed the hypocrisy of its double standards, to the chagrin and bewilderment of the men around her." (31)

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Man Ray's desperation after the departure of Miller, although unremarked in Self Portrait, was apparently quite intense. Even during their relationship, he was plagued by her lack of loyalty and unwillingness to conform to his ideas about their interdependence:

    I have loved you terrifically, jealously; it has reduced every other
    passion in me, and to compensate, I have tried to justify this love
    by giving you every chance in my power to bring out everything
    interesting in you. The more you seemed capable the more my love was
    justified, and the less I regretted any lost effort on my part. In
    fact it was a much more satisfactory form of realization, for me.
    You met me half-way on every occasion--until this new element
    appeared, which has given you the illusion that you are freeing
    yourself from being an accessory to me. I have tried to make you a
    complement to myself, but these distractions [her affairs] have made
    you waver, lose confidence in yourself, and so you want to go by
    yourself to reassure yourself. But you are merely getting yourself
    under someone else's control, much more subtle and indispensable.
    (32)

Man Ray's complaint that Miller was under the "control" of another lover hints at his understanding that she was out of his control. These intimate words to Miller suggest just how deeply Man Ray experienced his inability to contain her, even as he wrote about cultivating her artistic independence. His notion that her self-realization could somehow compensate for the passion he expended on her behalf is telling. It suggests that he felt he had wasted his emotions since she was unable or unwilling to match them. Such an impulse contradicts Man Ray's artistic oeuvre, which aimed to court chance, freedom, and lack of authorial control. Perhaps acknowledging this incongruity, he spoofed his desperation in a series of photographs (1932) that mock his suicide. With an excess of paraphernalia--a noose around his neck, a gun in his hand, a glass with a funnel indicating the addition of poison, and a clock ticking away the minutes of his life--Man Ray exaggerated his self-destructive impulses, allowing the photograph to stage his despair. (33)