Larmes
photograph
Larmes, or Tears; aka Larmes de Verre, in English, Glass Tears, is a black and white photograph created between 1930 and 1932 by the American photographer Man Ray.
History and description
The image was published in the December 1935 issue of the surrealist art magazine Minotaure, though a similar image of a single eye had appeared in a 1934 book of Ray's photographs.
The photograph is an extreme close-up of a woman's upturned face with glass droplets placed on her cheeks to imitate tears. Differing interpretations have been given for the meaning of the photograph. Art historian Erin C. Garcia wrote that Ray "emulated the melodrama that compensated for the lack of dialogue in silent films" in Larmes and likened the model's eyes to "insect-like creatures with hundreds of legs", and another critic wondered whether the image was "ridiculing female crocodile tears, or pouring scorn on the men who are taken in by such sentimentalism".
A 1995 sale of Larmes valued the image at between $200,000-$250,000.
Public collections
A print of Larmes is held in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles.
“Larmes” enters the record as photograph. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Larmes and photograph can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24063772. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1930, 1932, 1935 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “Larmes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.