In 2022 Le Violon d’Ingres, a black and white photograph of a woman’s back marked with violin f-holes, sold for $12.4 million, a record for any photograph at auction. This episode reveals the guarded secret behind that elite Parisian image: its creator was born Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia in 1890, the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant tailor, and spent his life scrubbing that origin from the record while placing flat irons, sewing machines, and mannequins at the center of his art.

We follow the 1912 name change, the anarchist Ferrer Center, the 1913 Armory Show, and the defining friendship with Marcel Duchamp that pulled him into Dada and ready-mades like The Gift, a flat iron studded with tacks. After founding the Société Anonyme and declaring New York too Dada to tolerate a rival, he moved to Paris in 1921, became the portrait photographer of Joyce, Stein, Dalí, and Picasso, discovered the camera-less rayograph by accident, and developed solarization with Lee Miller. The conversation covers his collaborators Kiki de Montparnasse and Ady Fidelin, his wartime exile in Los Angeles painting the Shakespearean Equations, a chilling friendship linked to the Black Dahlia case, and his return to Paris to archive his own legend.

• Why the ready-made is a psychological short circuit rather than a lazy prank
• How the Sabatier effect turns skin into shimmering liquid silver
• Noire et Blanche and translating the European fascination with African art into modernism
• A double wedding with Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in 1946
• An epitaph that reads unconcerned, but not indifferent