Marcel Proust on His Deathbed

Spotted: Idea after "Today is Art Day" on Twitter, after Google Image Search, 19 November 2018

"Marcel Proust on His Deathbed" is a memento mori taken by Man Ray two days after the French author's death, or on 20 November 1922. According to the J. Paul Getty Museum that has this gelatin silver print, "Marcel Proust spent the last night of his life dictating manuscript changes for a section of his famous novel Remembrance of Things Past" (title currently translated to In Search of Lost Time).

Best known for his photography (such as his "rayographs"), he was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in 1890 and passed away on 18 November 1976. A curator from the Jewish Museum in New York suggested that he could likely be the first Jewish avant-garde artist. He had a niece, Naomi Savage, another prominent American photographer, whose experiments in photography was the uncle's influence. Savage passed away 22 November 2005.

"I do not photograph nature. I photograph my visions," Man Ray was once quoted. At the International Center of Photography in New York, the exhibition "Man Ray: Photography and Its Double" was held from 18 November 1998 to 24 January 1999. The Man Ray Trust (which owns all copyrights, reproduction rights, intellectual and moral rights for the artist's creations from 1910 to 1976) notes on this exhibition:

Man Ray, who liked to present the image of himself as a dilettante, let us believe that his photographs were the result of chance. This presentation of his work proves that they were rather the product of careful reflection and diligent labor.