Echoes of the Past in Modern Work: Man Ray and Photography

I noticed the top photo on the internet and it occurred to me it reminded me of something...then it hit me: Modernism in Photography, and especially the work of Man Ray.

That's how it goes in the Arts-- people who worked almost a hundred years ago make their mark on the consciousness of other artists, but people forget the original artists...

Man Ray, like a lot of Jewish artists of the 1920's, reinvented himself to sound less Jewish (another photographer, Margaret Bourke-White, comes to mind...she was quite a trailblazer but chose an upper class Anglo-Saxon sounding name when her father was Jewish and her mother Irish)....

Here is what Wikipedia has to say ( or at least some of it) about Man Ray--quite a story:

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky, August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American modernist artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, and he was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. Ray is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.^[1]

Life and career

Background and early life

Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention at The Jewish Museum, New York

During his career as an artist, Man Ray allowed few details of his early life or family background to be known to the public. He even refused to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray.^[2]
Man Ray was born as Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. in 1890.^[3] He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants.^[3] He had a brother and two sisters, the youngest born in 1897 shortly after they settled in the Williamsburg^[3] neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray. Man Ray's brother chose the surname in reaction to the ethnic discrimination and anti-Semitism prevalent at the time. Emmanuel, who was called "Manny" as a nickname, changed his first name to Man and gradually began to use Man Ray as his combined single name.^[2][4]
Man Ray's father worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business out of the family home. He enlisted his children to assist him from an early age. Man Ray's mother enjoyed designing the family's clothes and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric.^[2] Man Ray wished to disassociate himself from his family background, but their tailoring left an enduring mark on his art. Mannequins, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to tailoring appear in almost every medium of his work.^[5] Art historians have noted similarities between Ray's collage and painting techniques and styles used for tailoring.^[4]
Mason Klein, curator of a Man Ray exhibition at the Jewish Museum entitled Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention, suggests that the artist may have been "the first Jewish avant-garde artist."^[3]