Man Ray

American Surrealist photographer, painter, film-maker, chess-player and anarchist. In the autumn of 1911 he began to life classes at the anarchist Modern School in Harlem (New York), also known as Ferrer School, and met a number of prominent anarchist intellectuals including Robert Henri, Emma Goldman Will Durant, Adolf Wolff, Jack London, John Reed, Alexander Berkman, Upton Sinclair, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Margaret Sanger, Isadora Duncan, Eugene O'Neill, etc. and studied several libertarian authors such as Max Stirner, Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, Thoreau, etc. and radical philosophers (Nietzsche, etc.).

Man Ray contributed to Emma Goldman's journal, ‘Mother Earth,’ by designing two covers of the magazine and, together with the Belgian anarchist Adon LaCroix (who he met while taking art lessons from Robert Henry and George Bellows at the Ferrer Center in New York, and who would later become his companion) would launch their own periodical, ‘The Ridgefield Gazook’, a proto-dadaist and anti-war broadsheet with explicit anarchist references. After befriending Adolph Wolff, Man Ray became acquainted with Stieglitz and Duchamp, joined the avant-garde, conceived Dada as a form of artistic anarchy, and forever changed the course of American art.