On Monday evening, The Metropolitan Museum of Art welcomed an intimate and thoughtfully curated opening reception for Man Ray: When Objects Dream. The exhibition, which opens to the public on September 14, reframes Man Ray’s groundbreaking rayographs—camera-less photographs formed with light, objects, and chance—within the broader context of his radical output in the 1910s and ’20s.

The evening also marked a major promised gift of nearly 200 Dada and Surrealist works from trustee John Pritzker, bringing cornerstone pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and others into The Met’s collection.

It was a quietly hopeful start to what promises to be a dreamlike dive into the intersection of photography, sculpture, and the surreal.