Including such well-known artists as Georgia O’Keeffe, Joan Miró and Le Corbusier among his sitters, Lye made these ‘photograms’ or ‘shadowgraphs’ without a camera by placing each subject between a light source and a sheet of photographic paper to leave their ghostly silhouette on its surface. In these works Lye drained the portrait of much of its resemblance, but added other traces of the sitter and new layers of meaning. Fascinated by the notion of individuality and the physical factors that inform each person’s makeup, many of Lye’s works can be considered meditations on identity.