Firestone displays Man Ray photographs

"You are all a lost generation," Gertrude Stein once told Ernest Hemingway, and the label stuck. She was referring to the American writers, artists and musicians who left the stodgy Puritanism of Prohibition and moved house to Paris. They adopted the French language and culture, but banded together as an expatriate community in a little bookshop called Shakespeare & Company.

A trio of curators has assembled a remarkably complete but manageable exhibit about that group using materials from Princeton's own Sylvia Beach Collection in Firestone. On the walls hang photographs of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis and William Carlos Williams. Most of them were taken by Man Ray, a photographic pioneer, whose portraits "have a way of getting into the consciousness of the sitter, which is the mark of a really great photographer," according to John L. Logan, one of the curators. Particularly striking is the one photo of Lewis, which Logan said subtly portrays "a dandified Midwesterner commenting on the non-dandified Midwest."

At the center of this circle is the ubiquitous Sylvia Beach, proprietress of Shakespeare & Company. Herself a photographer, she covered every square inch of wall space in her shop with portraits taken by and of her friends. Beginning life as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister in Princeton, she moved to Paris and met a much hipper and morally loose crowd. Adrienne Monnier, another bookstore owner, was her "companion," which is probably transparent code for lesbian lover.

The oil paintings in the exhibit of Beach and Monnier were done by Paul-Émile Bécat, who was widely known as a pornographer. Many of the other dramatis personae need no comment. Hemingway, returning bloodied after the liberation of France, remarked to Beach that he was now ready to "liberate the contents of the wine cellar at the Ritz."

Shakespeare & Company's contribution to both literature and photography is perhaps unique in the 20th century. It was here that the first edition of the touchstone modern novel, Joyce's "Ulysses," was published because of Beach's perseverance. Though the popularity of Man Ray has been eclipsed by later photographers, his style was an inspiration for all of his successors. Not only were his portraits exceptionally perceptive, but he was a tireless innovator. The large self-portrait at the entrance to the gallery shows an entirely un-photogenic space, the photographer's living room with narrow stairs leading up to his studio. He stands at the bottom of the steps, out of focus in an otherwise sharply focused shot. According to Logan, Man Ray was out of focus because he was moving and his intent was "showing how you can push technology," namely the technology of the still camera, which by definition is unable to show movement. His so-called Rayographs and pochoir works, a technically difficult kind of colored stencil art, show a surrealist sensibility that would be unsurpassed for their otherworldliness until the postmodern period.

The exhibit runs in the main exhibit gallery in Firestone until April 17.