A Stroll in the Gallery - Le violin de Ingres

Man Ray. Le violin de Ingres. 1924.

Doctoring photographs was nothing knew when Man Ray created this iconic image in 1924. Photographers had been retouching photos ever since Niépce and Daguerre invented the medium in the early 1800s. Indeed, an early test of the “art” in photography was evidence of the photo-maker’s hand in the print. It was understood to be a sleight of hand, known to discerning connoisseurs but not the public at large. What was astounding and revolutionary about Man Ray’s work was the obvious irony of his manipulation. To impose anachronism on it, Le violin de Ingres can be viewed as the Mother of All Photoshopped Images.

The model here is the legendary Kiki of Montparnasse, demurely Orientalist in her salad days.

Walker Evans on Paul Strand’s Blind (1916)

In a 1971 interview with Leslie Katz, Walker Evans was reluctant to talk about photographers and photographs that influenced him. Paul Strand’s 1916 image of the blind peddler was the one photograph he cited:

I remember coming across Paul Strand's Blind Woman when I was very young, and that really bowled me over. I'd already been in that and wanted to do that. It's a very powerful picture. I saw it in the New York Public Library file of "Camera Work," and I remember going out of there over stimulated: "That's the stuff, that's the thing to do." It charged me up.

Leslie Katz. “An Interview with Walker Evans.” (1971) pp. 366-7. In Goldberg, Vicki (Ed.) Photography in Print, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.