A photogram is a photographic image made without a camera by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material such as photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The usual result is a negative shadow image that shows variations in tone that depends upon the transparency of the objects used. Areas of the paper that have received no light appear white; those exposed for a shorter time or through transparent or semi-transparent objects appear grey, while fully-exposed areas are black in the final print. The technique is sometimes called cameraless photography. It was used by Man Ray in his rayographs. Other artists who have experimented with the technique include László Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad (who called them "Schadographs"), Imogen Cunningham and Pablo Picasso. Variations of the technique have also been used for scientific purposes, in shadowgraph studies of flow in transparent media and in high-speed Schlieren photography, and in the medical X-ray. The term photogram comes from the combining form phōtō- (φωτω-) of Ancient Greek phôs (φῶς, "light"), and Ancient Greek suffix -gramma (-γραμμα), from grámma (γράμμα, "written character, letter, that which is drawn"), from gráphō (γράφω, "to scratch, to scrape, to graze").
History
Prehistory The phenomenon of the shadow has long aroused human curiosity and inspired artistic representation, as recorded by Pliny the Elder, and various forms of shadow play since the 1st millennium BCE. The photogram, in essence, is a means by which the fall of light and shade on a surface may be automatically captured and preserved. To do so required a substance that would react to light. From the 17th century, photochemical reactions were progressively observed or discovered in salts of silver, iron, uranium and chromium. In 1725, Johann Heinrich Schulze was the first to demonstrate a temporary photographic effect in silver salts, confirmed by Carl Wilhhelm Scheele in 1777, who found that violet light caused the greatest reaction in silver chloride. Humphry Davy and Thomas Wedgwood reported that they had produced temporary images from placing stencils/light sources on photo-sensitized materials but had no means of fixing (making permanent) the images.
Nineteenth century
The first photographic negatives made were photograms (though the first permanent photograph was made with a camera by Nicéphore Niépce). William Henry Fox Talbot called these photogenic drawings, which he made by placing leaves or pieces of lace onto sensitized paper, then leaving them outdoors on a sunny day to expose them. This produced a dark background with a white silhouette of the placed object. In 1843, Anna Atkins produced a book titled British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions in installments, the first to be illustrated with photographs. The images were all photograms of botanical specimens, mostly seaweeds, which she made using Sir John Herschel's cyanotype process, which yields blue images.
Modernism Photograms and artists who worked with(in)the medium have contributed to several demarcated modern art movements, such as Dada and Constructivism, and in architecture in the formalist dissections of the Bauhaus. The relative ease of access (not needing a camera and, depending on the medium, a darkroom) and perhaps the interactive, even seemingly incidental, nature of creating photograms enabled experiments in abstraction by Christian Schad as early as 1918, Man Ray in 1921, and Moholy-Nagy in 1922, through dematerialisation and distortion, merging and interpenetration of forms, and flattening of perspective. Outside Europe and North America, interwar photographic modernism in Japan’s "New Photography" movement (shinkō shashin) included work in photograms, which the critic Nobuo Ina identified (along with photomontage) as one of the movement’s approaches.
Christian Schad's 'schadographs' In 1918, Christian Schad's experiments with the photogram were inspired by Dada, creating photograms from random arrangements of discarded objects he had collected such as torn tickets, receipts and rags. Some argue that he was the first to make this an art form, preceding Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy by at least a year or two, and one was published in March 1920 in the magazine Dadaphone by Tristan Tzara, who dubbed them 'Schadographs'.
Man Ray's 'rayographs'
Photograms were used in the 20th century by a number of photographers, particularly Man Ray, whose "rayographs" were also given the name by Dada leader Tzara. Ray described his (re-)discovery of the process in his 1963 autobiography;
"Again at night I developed the last plates I had exposed; the following night I set to work printing them. Besides the trays and chemical solutions in bottles, a glass graduate and thermometer, a box of photographic paper, my laboratory equipment was nil. Fortunately, I had to make only contact prints from the plates. I simply laid a glass negative on a sheet of light-sensitive paper on the table, by the light of my little red lantern, turned on the bulb that hung from the ceiling, for a few seconds, and developed the prints. It was while making these prints that I hit on my Rayograph process, or cameraless photographs. One sheet of photo paper got into the developing tray - a sheet unexposed that had been mixed with those already exposed under the negatives - I made my several exposures first, developing them together later - and as I waited in vain a couple of minutes for an image to appear, regretting the waste paper, I mechanically placed a small glass funnel, the graduate and the thermometer in the tray on the wetted paper, I turned on the light: before my eyes an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted by the glass more or less in contact with the paper and standing out against a black background, the part directly exposed to the light. I remembered when I was a boy placing fern leaves in a printing frame with proof paper, exposing it to sunlight, and obtaining a white negative of the leaves. This was the same idea, but with an added three-dimensional quality and tonal gradation."
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