Man Ray’s photograph of an arm is cropped so abstractly that it seems to metamorphose into other body parts—a knee, a calf, a thigh—or into some utterly unidentifiable yet heroic form. This image appeared on the cover of Formes Nues (1935), which also included the work of Brassaï, László Moholy-Nagy, Franz Roh, and George Platt Lynes, among others. In the magazine’s introduction, Man Ray wrote, "were it not for the fact that photography permits me to seize and to possess the human body and face in more than a temporary manner, I should quickly have tired of this medium."
