CategoriesMedium and Techniques
Photogram
Camera-less photographs made by laying objects on light-sensitive paper and exposing it, leaving pale shadows on a dark ground.
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About
A photogram needs no camera or lens. Objects placed on or above sensitised paper block the light, and when the sheet is developed they show as pale shapes: sharp where they touched, soft where they hovered, half-toned where light passed partly through. William Henry Fox Talbot made photogenic drawings of leaves and lace in the 1830s, and Anna Atkins produced her book of British algae as blue cyanotypes from 1843.
The method was taken up again after the First World War. Christian Schad made small prints from scraps of paper around 1919, and in the early 1920s Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy explored the process independently, Man Ray calling his results rayographs. Later artists work at large scale: Adam Fuss has recorded babies in water and snakes in talc, and Garry Fabian Miller passes light through glass vessels and cut paper. Each is a unique print.
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