Self-portrait (Penguin Books)

In this remarkable autobiography, Man Ray - painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer - relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawing classes in a Brooklyn high school, to the glamorous and heady days of Paris in the 1940s, when any trip to the city 'was not complete until they had been "done" aby Man Ray's camera'. Friend to everyone who was anyone, Ray tells everything he knows of artists, socialites and writers such as Matisse, Hemingway, Picasso and Joyce, not to mention Lee Miller, Nancy Cunard, Alberto Giacometti, Gertrude Stein, Dali, Max Ernst and many more, in this decadent, sensational account of the early twentieth-century cultural world.