stylistic:tone
Background and early life

During his career, Man Ray allowed few details of his early life or family background to be known to the public. He even refused to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray, and his 1963 autobiography Self-Portrait contains few dates.

Man Ray was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia on August 27, 1890. He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants Melach "Max" Radnitzky, a tailor, and Manya "Minnie" Radnitzky (née Lourie or Luria). He had a brother, Sam, and two sisters, Dorothy "Dora" and Essie (or Elsie), the youngest born in 1897 shortly after they settled at 372 Debevoise St. in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In early 1912, the Radnitzky family changed their surname to Ray; Sam chose this surname in reaction to the antisemitism prevalent at the time. Emmanuel, who was nicknamed "Manny", changed his first name to Man and gradually began to use Man Ray as his name.

Man Ray's father worked in a garment factory and ran a small tailoring business out of the family home. He enlisted his children to assist him from an early age. Man Ray's mother enjoyed designing the family's clothes and inventing patchwork items from scraps of fabric. Man Ray wished to distance himself from his family background, but tailoring left an enduring mark on his art. Mannequins, flat irons, sewing machines, needles, pins, threads, swatches of fabric, and other items related to tailoring appear in much of his work, and art historians have noted similarities between Ray's collage and painting techniques and styles used for tailoring.

Mason Klein, curator of the exhibition Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention at the Jewish Museum in New York, suggests that Man Ray may have been "the first Jewish avant-garde artist."

Man Ray was the uncle of the photographer Naomi Savage, who learned some of his techniques and incorporated them into her own work.