Until last month, the works of French-American photographer Man Ray, whom Jean Cocteau called 'the poet of the darkroom', were largely shown only in the Americas and Europe.
That changed last month, when the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney, opened the first solo Man Ray exhibition in this part of the world. It will spend the next 10 months travelling around the country.
The show's 200 photos, mostly taken before the second world war, come from two French collections. Many form part of the private collection of Lucien Treillard, Man Ray's assistant at the time of his death in 1976. They include photos, but also some films, which foreshadow the rise of video art. Curator Judy Annear says the exhibition is 'important on a global scale'.
'Man Ray is one of the most innovative and important artists of the 20th century because of his experiments with photography, especially solarisation and use of the photogram technique,' she says.
Many of his dreamy, almost blurry black and white images were created with solarisation, a process in which film is left exposed for long periods of time in relative darkness.
'He revolutionised fashion photography through presenting models and clothes as objects of desire,' Annear says. 'His photographs of even mundane objects turned them into enigmatic things of wonder.'
There are iconic works such as Le Violon d'Ingres (1924), which depicts a woman's back fashioned in the shape of a cello.