slowlight

Ether 8, by Stefanie Valentin

Photograms began with plants and flowers, with Anna Atkins making botanical cyanotypes in the 1840s, and it still seems like a rich vein to mine in contemporary work. I’ve already posted links to some artists who work with bugs, botanics, and bodygrams, but here’s more of the good stuff:

bugs

• Stefanie Valentin makes colour photograms of butterflies and other insects
• Honey Bee: eight photograms of a bee by Amber Elliot
• Polaroid photograms of moths and flies, by Miles Sprietsma. These photograms are part of one of Miles’ larger projects, described in the short documentary film Insects, Art, & I
• Keith Carter’s recent Talbot’s Shadow series of photograms includes butterflies, birds, and bones.

Dandelion, by David Dennison

botanics

• David Dennison makes soft, delicate, colour flower photograms using film rather than paper.
• Jeff Tolentino works with Polaroid photograms, in this series Small Leaves
• Seven teatoned botanical photograms by Sean Scoggins: simple and elegant.
• Maple leaf: from a much larger set of black and white photograms by Brian Krummel
• Remedy: a single floral photogram by Brea Souders, that has some rather lovely background effects from contact printing with a wet negative and then tea toning the print.
• Giles Revell and Matt Whiley make photograms from dried, broken, skeletal leaves
• James Hajicek and Carol Panaro-Smith collaborate to make photograms of plants dug from the earth or found in the sea (more can be seen here, and in the Nature’s Notations series)
• Angela Easterling, whose work includes commissions by the Eden Project, has some rather lovely sunprints and cyanotypes of both flowers and bodies on her site.

Awakening, stages I-IV, by Glenn Friedel

and a few more bodies…

• Glenn Friedel has been making large, bright, energetic body prints for over a decade
• Mark Mangan has a set of six lively black and white body photograms on Flickr

and, yes, there’s even more to come. Tomorrow: science is beautiful.

chemigram by Polly Marriner

Pierre Cordier, who invented the chemigram in 1958, would argue that it’s not photography at all, in that though it uses photographic materials, it’s painting with chemicals not painting with light. Most artists I can find working with chemigrams today, however, combine Cordier’s techniques with methods all their own, and clearly use light as part of their process. In my hunt for interesting work in this area, my preference is very much on the side of light–Sarachek and Marriner in particular–rather than in chemistry alone.

The small amounts of experimentation I’ve done have combined sunprinting photograms, and then adding chemigram work to the mix before fixing.

• Norman Sarachek makes some of the loveliest chemigrams, mostly inspired by Chinese and Japanese ink painting. These really bring out the sense that chemigrams fall halfway between photography and painting.
• Polli Marriner, from New Zealand, makes lush, landscape-ish chemigrams which look poured rather than painted. You can see a few her pieces elsewhere, at much larger sizes.
• Four abstract chemigrams by Francoise André that seem to hit a halfway point between the two ends of chemigrams.
• And Michael C. Howell’s chemigrams feel much closer to painting than photography or printmaking. I wonder if this comes from the way he works more closely along the lines of Cordier’s methods of resists. (a few more here)
• Cheryl van Hooven’s light drawings should probably be classified as luminograms, but look closer to a certain type of chemigram.
• Luke Kurtis has a couple of pieces on Flickr in the same vein–dragons and straw drippings–that look very much like chemigrams.
• Some of Catherine Doran’s small set of delicate, pretty photograms also appear to be chemigrams.

Intruder, by Stefan Engstrom

and, purely on the side of light:

• Stefan Engstrom makes beautiful, ethereal monochrome luminograms using refraction patterns, some of which are printed as cyanotypes.
• Cally Iden makes abstract colour photograms with light painting, often layering them up in montages. And, bonus: she has some pinhole work on her site too.
• Kristian Thacker has a lovely range of Polaroid photograms and luminograms on Flickr

and still more photograms to come tomorrow…

Seeds of Green Starlight, by Reciprocity (image copyright Alan Jaras)

More luminograms (nothing but light itself thrown onto film or paper), photograms (objects placed directly on the light-sensitive material), body grams (where the photogram is made of body), and other variations on this rich seam of cameraless photography:

• Alan Jaras uses glass and plastics to throw caustics and light refractions directly onto 35mm film, creating an incredible range of wild, bright, delicate, complex patterns. See this series, too, where he’s using shaped and formed plastics to control the patterns in other ways. Beautiful.
• Ute Lindner’s cyanograms are shown on and between glass. I’m not entirely sure what these are, or how they are made, but they are lovely things.
• Michel Flomen’s Higher Ground is a series of large positive prints from photogram (maybe luminogram) negatives of fireflies.
• Seze Devres has a big, beautiful site full of her abstract colour photogram work.
• Natalie Ital uses multiple flash exposures on cibachome to make large, bright, colourful body photograms, layering images, objects, and poses together.
• Henri Foucault makes simpler body photogram works in black and white.
• Agnes Eperjesi made a series of body photograms of newborn babies.
• Anne Ferran’s work includes some ghostly, delicate photograms of nineteenth century women’s clothing
• Erika Blumenfeld’s Light Graphs–Winter Solstice luminogram project was a series of hundreds of polaroids, one exposed directly to the light for two seconds for each minute from just before sunrise to just after dark.

and, taking things even further, Kosmos is a rather mindblowing photogram film. Made in 2005, by David Finkelstein, this was made by growing crystals directly onto film, and then shining light through them. Five glorious minutes of hypnotic, vertigo-inducing beauty (though I’d recommend watching with the sound off).

It looks like this is turning into photogram week, so there’s still lots more cameraless photography to come…

tulips, by imagemkr1

A handful of artists working with photograms, sunprints, and shadowprints:

• Daniel Ranalli spent ten years working almost exclusively with photograms, likening his beautiful work to something a “…bit like drawing with invisible ink - nothing you are doing reveals itself until the sheet of paper is developed - at which point it is too late to change anything.”
• Wolfgang Reichmann exposes photograms onto black and white paper, that, over time changes from orange to pink to purple depending on the make. These are then fixed, but not developed, to preserve the colours.
• Kunié Sugiura’s work ranges from delicate wisps of wire and flowers to huge, striking body-photograms of boxers and artists including Jasper Johns
• James Welling’s chromogenic photogram prints of flowers are a nice, contemporary-design twist on a long tradition
• Harry Nankin has a long practice of cameraless photography, and is currently making shadowgrams of living plants and falling rain in the Tasmanian rainforests.

more tomorrow!

Becoming Magma 2, June 2004, Gary Fabian Miller

Bristol-born artist Garry Fabian Miller has been working with cameraless photography for the past 22 years, and, along with photographers like Paul Kenny and Susan Derges, is performing magic with the most basic ingredients of light and chemistry.

The image at the top of this post is from a beautiful series of large, unique dye-destruction prints that use more and more time and light as they progress. Using photogram techniques–passing light through oil, coloured water, and plants directly onto light-sensitive papers–he is doing something amazing with the simplest building blocks of photography. This series, for me, hits an almost ideal balance between abstraction and detail. At first glance, they are incredibly simple works, but they draw you further and further in in an almost hypnotic way.

“The pictures I make are of nothing which exists in the world…What I am trying to suggest is a state of mind which lifts the spirits and gives strength and some kind of clarity.”

His Thoughts of a Night Sea series echoes his earliest landscape work, but these gorgeous, luminous seascapes, creating memories of the light at the line where the sea and sky join are also are made without a camera, just controlled light-falls onto paper in the studio.

Very widely exhibited, there are pieces of his work viewable all over the web, but Illumine, a major retrospective of his work, looks like a luscious treat to buy if you can’t stretch your budget to one of his original works.

If you’re in New York today, please go, if you can, go and join the Filmmaker/Photographer contingent at this Friday’s First Amendment rally at Union Square. Recently proposed regulations seriously threaten the rights of photographers and filmmakers to operate in NYC, and they could go into effect as soon as this August. Other laws already restrict our rights to parade, dance, meet, bike, shout, and assemble.

Join performance artists Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir, the Rude Mechanical Orchestra, Critical Mass bike riders, and Picture New York–a new coalition of concerned filmmakers and photographers, for a festive and un-permitted celebration of the First Amendment.

Friday, July 27, 6:30pm
Union Square, north end
Press Conference and Creative Rally

Bring: marching bands, gospel choirs, props and signs, cameras, projections, bikes, you and your friends, and the 44 sweet words of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

If you’re outside NYC, please consider signing the online petition, or emailing the Mayor.

And yes, this is a big deal for pinhole photographers too! Why? Because the NY Times reports that the city’s tentative rules include requiring any group of two or more people who want to use a camera in a single public location for more than a half hour (including setup and breakdown time) to get a city permit and $1 million in liability insurance. The regulation would also apply to any group of five or more people who would be using a tripod for more than ten minutes, including setup and breakdown time.

UPDATE: good news! The Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater, and Broadcasting agreed to reconsider and redraft the rules, and include more public hearing and comment. more info in the NYT…

verycoolthings.com is selling a really nifty-looking Japanese stereo pinhole camera kit for $30. Shipping’s 6 bucks in the US, more outside.

How good it feels to return to making pinhole photographs, and to return to the vertical. The last ones I made, in late March, were made on the last day I was able to stand on my own two feet. I’ve been dabbling in the dark side for the past couple of weeks, using a lens camera, but for contrary reasons, I decided I’d hold off on making any new pinhole pictures until I was able to stand again. Two rounds of surgery and almost four months on, here are the first couple of new images.

Like all of my Balacing Act series, the exposures are timed only by how long I am able to hold a position, to stand or balance. Admittedly, in the second, I’m only on one leg, with my other foot just touching the ground for stability, but that’s the first weight I’ve put through my new hip and femur hardware. If that’s not cause for celebration, and a new photograph, I’m not sure what is.

(Larger versions of each image: vertical i and vertical ii.)

Not lensless photography by any stretch of the imagination, but this online exhibition of Eugene Atget’s work is not to be missed. The French National Library has put together a huge collection of his gorgeous, fascinating work. Put aside an hour or two, and get lost in his beautiful documentation of Paris…

Shi Guorui, like Vera Lutter, makes huge camera obscura photographs, exploring the sense of place, and seems to mostly exhibit his works as negatives. He’s used one of the watchtowers on the Great Wall of China as a camera, set up a camera obscura in a karaoke room to get a huge overview of Shanghai, and built another vast camera in situ in the Himalayas:

Shi Guorui in 2005 completed his third major, large scale camera obscura work. This project captured Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world using a special construction for a camera. Unlike his earlier projects where he was able to use existing buildings or rooms in buildings as his camera, the camera for Everest was built on site. The artist made a number of trips to Everest to pick the perfect high altitude site.

He’s recently been working on a project in the US, with the For-Site foundation, exploring iconic places around the country. There’s an interesting article about the Beijing-based artist, which touches on why he works with both size and slowness:

“I think it’s very pure,” said Shi, who loves the long hours spent in the dark silence of the camera, thinking about the outer and inner worlds, the look, history and spirit of the place whose image is being burned onto the wall. “When I’m inside, I feel this quiet in my mind, in my heart. I’m very peaceful, happy inside. The time for normal people is very long. For me, I feel the time is blank. It goes by very quickly.”

Sometimes he drinks tea or a beer while he’s in the tent, gazing at the paper where the picture is being imprinted, seeing the complete image develop in his mind long before the chemicals actually make it clearly visible.”

(Another article, including a picture of his photograph of the Hollywood sign, in the NY Times, explores similar ideas

“Early on I was interested in these technical details,” Mr. Shi said as he sat in the darkness. “But what’s important to me now is the process.”

“This is a spiritual experience for me, sitting inside the camera,” he continued. “I am not a practicing Buddhist but this is my form of meditation. This is my practice.”

Shi Guorui’s work from this project is on view at the de Young in San Francisco until 30th September 2007.