In these he exposed film in direct contact with the object to be recorded. His verbal facility holds all that experimentation together. One recognizes right away his mix of poetry and humor, like a joke too dazzling to spoil by laughter. It gives his assemblages the bite of Dada and the allusiveness of Surrealism. The Rope Dancer Accompanying Herself with Her Shadow .
Art is supposed to be mute.
In Renaissance iconography , painting is gagged, because it is silent music. Man Ray is a talker, and his love of words may also account for the ghostliness of his images. In that great painting colored planes learn to dance, as Cubism's thrusting volumes do indeed become shadows. The Rayograms too start with something direct and physical, an object in contact with the medium, but they resemble phantoms. Imagine X rays that see into a body and find that it has disappeared, like a portrait after the dead.