DAY 122

HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Photograms

WRITING WITH LIGHT

Photograms are photographs in perhaps the truest sense because they are images created with exposure to light, but they are not considered photographs in the conventional sense because they are not created using a camera.

When objects are arranged on photographic film or photosensitive paper, exposed to light and then developed, all but the areas of the paper where objects had been placed are rendered black, leaving a pattern in the shape of the objects. Different effects are achieved when objects of varying degrees of solidity are used, either laid directly on the surface or just over it.

In the development of photography, many of the early inventors experimented with what would later be named photograms, but, around 1918, cutting-edge artists—such as Christian Schad and soon after Man Ray and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy—who were working with photography began presenting abstract art in the form of photograms.

Man Ray, an established painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and photographer, came upon photograms as a result of a darkroom mishap and soon became entranced with the form, which he called “rayographs.” His work in the form produced increasingly more complex, sophisticated images as he continued to experiment with the effects of light and motion during his exposures. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s Man Ray was at the forefront of the surrealist and dadaist movements, exhibiting in major galleries and, in 1935, as part of a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. —DJG