[2] In 1960, he signed, along with Arman, François Dufrêne, Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Jacques Villeglé and Pierre Restany, the Manifesto of New Realism.

[4] In 2001, the Centre Georges Pompidou devoted a retrospective exhibition to Raymond Hains in Paris called La tentative (The Endeavour).

[6] Shortly after enrolling in the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, Hains decided to leave school and move to Paris.

One day, in the family's glazing workshop, he noticed some rejects of fluted glass splashed with paint - an accidental prism - and decided to use those latter for his photographs.

He had effectively developed a new kind of camera, the Hypnagogoscope (expression made of three Greek words : hypnos : “sleep”; agogos “one who leads” and skopein “to observe”).

Hains’ use of hypnagogy enabled him to tear himself away from the usual tendency of photography to mimic: it deconstructed the light and transformed the image into abstract lines.

In 1952, he published Graphism in Photographs: When photography becomes the object in the fifth issue of Photo Almanach Prisma,[8] where he explained that manipulating the image enabled him to make the subject abstract.

This text served as his own personal manifesto, where he questioned the generally accepted notion of realism and affirmed, citing Apollinaire, his conviction of the necessity for the artist to invent new realities.

Together with Jacques Villeglé, they adopted the process of visual distortion, adding grooved glass to the camera and producing abstract films inspired by Henri Matisse's watercolor cut-outs.

In an innovative way, texts and images were there the source for a project in constant progress: they could be virtually pasted or unpasted, opened in accordance with current affairs or even combined in the same way the unconscious mind would act in the process of dreaming.

Equipped with his camera while strolling through the streets, Hains took pictures of certain details at construction sites; for example isolating a concrete block in which he sensed a potential sculpture.