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Creating the Photogram
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19738 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
1,494 Words |
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Louis Kaplan and Jeannine Fiedler
Louis Kaplan and Jeannine Fiedler write on the arts from
Berlin, Germany. |
"When everything that people call art had got the rheumatics all over, the photographer lit the thousands of candles in his lamp, and the sensitive paper gradually absorbed the darkness between the shapes of certain everyday objects."
This is the Dadaist Tristan Tzara's poetic description of the genesis (or the rebirth) of another kind of photographic practice: the photogram. The photogram is photography without the mediation of a camera or a lens. It moves light from its background role in the studios of the traditional photographer into the spotlight. The photographer need only light the candles or the lamp and let things proceed accordingly.
The photogram is produced through the direct interaction of a light source and objects alone. It records or traces the results of this encounter on any light sensitive paper. The photogram technique dematerializes and disembodies the world of objects in the production of mysterious abstract compositions. Rather than the photographic documentation of reality which demands the exacting mastery of the person behind the lens, the photogram procedure incorporates favorable accidents and chance elements. The modulator of light never knows what the results will look like. He becomes, in Tzara's words, the "negotiator of luminous values."
In Anwesenheit bei Abwesenheit: Fotogramme und die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Presence by absence: phototgrams and the art of the twentieth century), Floris M. Neususs has assembled a brilliant and illuminating exhibition that documents the rediscovery of the photogram technique as a medium by avant-garde artists in the 1920s and traces the variety of its artistic uses until the present. The exhibition brings together more than four hundred of the most important examples of photograms through the decades and displays the most valued among this luminous medium. In a recent interview, Neususs stressed that the overarching concept in the design of the exhibition is to bring Presence by Absence to the three major European urban centers that witnessed the simultaneous and independent flourishing of the medium seventy years ago--Zurich, Paris, and Berlin. First and foremost, the show is organized around four major principal innovators of the photogram--Christian Schad, Man Ray, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Raoul Hausmann. In addition to showcasing their most important pieces, there is also the chance to see numerous works in other media that are related to their light experiments.
These pieces and general examples from the avant-garde movements (including original
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