Natasha

Lee Miller, in an undated letter addressed to her brother Eric, but probably from 1929, tells that she was working with Man Ray in the darkroom, when the procedure used here, solarization, was discovered. “Something rubbed on my leg [...]. I screamed and turned on the light abruptly. I did not find out what it was, maybe it was a mouse. But I noticed that the film had been exposed. In the development tray, there were a dozen developed negatives on a nude over a black background. Man Ray took them, dipped them in the tray with hyposulphite and looked. The unexposed part of the negative – the black background – had been, under the effect of the lamp light, changed to the edge of the naked and white body”. Besides this brief account, much in Man Ray’s spirit, it should be kept in mind that, according to Lee Miller’s words, Man Ray made this into a device “which he learned to fully master, in order to obtain the effect he wished at each time”. Solarization, a technical effect well-known by the photographers under the name of “Sabatier effect” is technically defined as “the partial inversion of values in a photograph,” accompanied by a characteristic black lining. It can be made during the making of a print in the positive or directly on the negative. Man Ray did it essentially on the negative, which allowed him to later work this image as another, especially when reframing it. The critics did not fail to associate this effect to Ingres’ design, as he gave to the photographic writing one of its features: the line.