This photograph was first published in the May 1926 issue of French Vogue with the title Mother-of-pearl Face and Ebony Mask. Man Ray created this work in collaboration with another expatriate American artist and art editor at Vogue named Georges Sakier. The composition juxtaposes Sakier’s Baule portrait mask of a woman from the Ivory Coast (made for the tourist trade) with the stylishly made-up and coiffed head of Man Ray’s renowned companion Kiki (who also posed for the composition Le Violon d’Ingres nearby). Given Vogue’s sophisticated readership, this photograph catered to the contemporary French interest in things African. But after the work was included in a 1934 exhibition held in Brussels in honor of the Surrealist journal Minotaure (entitled Black and White), it became one of the iconic photographs of Surrealism.