A man and woman having sex; her legs spread, him on top of her; shot at midrange, capturing her thighs, backside, and genitals; and his back, thighs, backside, and genitals, to be titled Spring.
The same man and woman having sex; her legs spread, him on top of her; shot close-up from above, cropped tightly to focus on the point of their connection, titled Summer.
The cupid’s bow lips of the woman fellating the man; shot very close-up, titled Autumn.
The man inside the woman from behind, shot close-up at hip level, titled Winter.
These were the four photographs Man Ray gave to Louis Aragon in 1929 for publication in an art book they were working on, to be titled 1929.
Sometime prior to that transaction, there had been a meeting of Surrealists at the Café Radio on the Place Blanche to discuss the plight of a Belgian comrade whose little avant-garde magazine Variétés was foundering. One among the group, Benjamin Péret, suggested a special one-off issue to raise some emergency cash, something sure to capture public attention, an issue filled with sex poems written by himself and Aragon. The idea grew. It would be more than a special issue; it would be a standalone chapbook devoted to the subject of sex. They would design it to look as plain as the content inside was meant to be shocking, to mislead the censors, to be ironic.
1929 would mimic a calendar, a dirty catechism, framed in sections named for the four seasons, riffing on the almanacs the post offices and fire stations printed each year for their employees to sell door to door to earn their Christmas bonuses.
Aragon and Péret wrote their poetry. And then Aragon went to Man Ray seeking visual content.
Two hundred and fifteen copies of 1929 were printed, secretly and relatively luxuriously, in Brussels. French customs officials seized most of the run, but some got through to Paris.
While their eyes aren’t shown, people in Montparnasse would have been able to quickly guess the identity of the couple in the photographs by the available data: the man’s small, thin, hairy frame and the woman’s trademark cupid’s bow lips; their skin tones; and the angles of certain of the photographs, all four signed Man Ray, indicating that the same man doing the photographing was the one being caught on film. These may well have been the “photos of love-making between a man and a woman,” as Henri-Pierre Roché described them, that Man Ray showed to him back in 1922.
The poems in 1929 are self-consciously blasphemous, meant to titillate and provoke. The four photographs are explicit. In tone and content, they’re light-years away from any of the nudes Man Ray and Kiki produced in their time together.
It’s not known when they rigged up a camera to capture their coupling or what eventual purposes each one had in mind for the pictures. To an outsider, they would seem to be private photographs, taken for the pleasure of the two people involved.
There is no record of Man Ray consulting with Kiki about releasing the photographs publicly before giving them to Aragon.
There is no record of how the timing of Man Ray’s giving Aragon the photographs fell in relation to Kiki’s leaving Man Ray, nor of Man Ray’s learning that Kiki would soon be sharing the details of her life (and presumably his) in a book.
There is no record of Kiki’s reaction to the photographs circulating among her friends and acquaintances.