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Ray spent his evenings at the Café Certá talking with Breton, Arp. De Chirico and Léger and making composite drawings that they called "exquisite corpses." This was actually an old parlor game. One artist would draw a head, fold the paper and pass it on to the next man, who would draw the body without seeing what had already been done. "We used to fabricate all sorts of monsters." says Ray.
Ray stayed in Paris, painting and photographing, and became a leading exponent of dada's successor, surrealism. When the Germans came in 1940, he took off for Hollywood, where he painted, photographed and lectured. In 1951 he went back to Paris and the Latin Quarter. There he now works, but never more than two hours at a stretch. "I like to work at white heat for short periods," he explains. Painting is his main love, but photography brings in more money. Like a true dadaist, Ray scorns credit for the unquestionable skill of his photographs: "Many photographers consider themselves as artists. In my opinion, 99% credit should go to Mr.
Zeiss and Mr. Eastman and 1% to the man who happens to stand behind the camera." Or, as a dadaist once abjured, "Stop looking! Stop talking!"
* So named when a knife was plunged into a French dictionary, stabbed the word dada, meaning, appropriately, "hobbyhorse."