A portraitist and fashion practitioner by profession, an artist by vocation, Man Ray found in the female figure one of his greatest interests: models, muses, companions, pupils and colleagues such as Berenice Abbott, Lee Miller, Meret Oppenheim, Nusch Éluard, Kiki de Montparnasse, Dora Maar and Juliet form a universe of relations as different as they were crucial in the evolution of his life and of his poetics.

Those women were in some cases makers in their own right.