Art & Creativity Quote by Man Ray

Man Ray’s line reads like a sly mission statement for an artist who refused to treat mediums as polite job titles. “I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint” isn’t an apology for photography’s supposed lesser status; it’s a declaration that the camera is for realities too stubborn, too already-made, to be “improved” by the painterly hand. The subtext is practical and philosophical at once: if something arrives in the world with its own authority - a face, a street scene, a machine part, a shadow - then painting it risks turning it into an interpretation before you’ve even looked at it honestly.

The kicker is the second clause: “the things which already have an existence.” Man Ray is poking at the centuries-old prestige economy where painting creates, photography merely copies. He flips it. Existing things are not artistically inert; their “already-ness” is precisely what makes them worth photographing. Photography becomes a tool for collecting evidence of the world’s strange readymade poetry, not a shortcut around skill.

Context matters: this is Dada and Surrealism talking. Man Ray made photograms (“rayographs”) and studio portraits that treated light itself as sculpture. So when he draws a boundary between painting and photographing, it’s not a conservative boundary; it’s a strategic one. Painting can invent, distort, hallucinate. Photography can snatch the real and, by framing it, make it uncanny. The intent isn’t to rank mediums but to assign them different kinds of truth - one fabricated, one captured, both equally manipulative.