Painter, maker of objects and author of avant-garde films, he is known above all as a Surrealist photographer. In New York he formed, with Marcel Duchamp, the American branch of the Dada movement; in 1921 he moved to Montparnasse, where Kiki de Montparnasse became his favourite model. With Arp, Ernst, Masson, Miró and Picasso he showed in the first Surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1925, and over the next twenty years he revolutionised photographic art: James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Jean Cocteau posed before his camera, and with Lee Miller, his lover and assistant, he invented the solarisation technique.