Experimental Imagery in Photography - · PDF fileExperimental Imagery in Photography ... The areas of the paper that has received on light will appear ... than a scientific interest

Experimental Imagery in Photography

Unit 32 By Katie Palmer

Introduction and Photograms

• A photogram is an photographic image which is made without a camera. It is made by placing objects directly onto the surface of a light-sensitive material like photographic paper and then exposing it to light. The areas of the paper that has received on light will appear white on the paper.

Transparency: Solid objects create a different effect to glass. Shape: How about creating your own shapes out of materials to enhance the image. Composition: A key factor of any artwork.

Man Ray

• Man Ray was an America modernist artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. He is well known in the art world for his avant-grade photography. Furthermore, he was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. Also, he was known for his work with photograms, which he called “rayographs”. At a young age, Man Ray displayed artistic and mechanical abilities.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

• Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian painter. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts. Throughout his career, he became proficient and innovative in the fields of photography, typography, sculpture, painting, printmaking and finally, industrial design. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy experimented with the photographic process of exposing light sensitive paper with objects overlain on top of it, this is called photogram.

Christian Schad

• Christian Schad was a German painter. His portraits form an extraordinary record of life in Vienna and Berlin in the years following World War 1. In 1918, Schad started creating his own versions of the photograms. Later in his life he named them after him, they were called “Schadographs”.

• Christian Schad’s works of 1915-1916 showed the influence of cubism and futurism. Schad began experimenting by making camera-less photographic images in 1918, which were inspired by cubism. By 1919, Schad was collecting discarded objects such as torn tickets, receipts, etc. to create photograms.

Adam Fuss

• Adam Fuss is a British photographer. He began a series of pinhole-camera images in 1984 and began exhibiting his work in 1985. He became interested in photography at a young age. Adam Fuss is known for photographing unusual subject matter and making brilliant coloured photograms. Adam Fuss’s work investigates the elements of life and basic materials of photography.

Own photogram images created on MOMA Red Studio.

Bokeh • Bokeh is a Japanese word for ‘boke’ and means blur or a blurry quality. Also, it is

one of the most popular subjects in photography. In Bokeh it is only an element of the image that is intentionally blurred. Furthermore, it tends to emphasize certain points of light in the image. To create the Bokeh effect you use a shallow depth of field which is created through a wide open aperture. Also, the ISO should be no higher than 400.We need to make sure it is no higher than 400 ISO so you don’t get any graininess, which will ruin the prints of the image. For this exposure an F number of 5.6 and a shutter speed of 125th of a second needs to be selected.

Abelardo Morell

• Abelardo Morell is a Boston-based photographer, who was born in 1948 in Havana, Cuba. He is well known in the photographic community for creating camera obscura images around the world and then photographing them.

Cyannotypes

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process, also known as a blueprint, as it gives a cyan-blue print. This process was quite popular in engineering circles well into the 20th century. Furthermore, it was simple and low-cost process and you could create large-scale copies of their work, referred as blueprints. The two chemicals used in the process are Ammonium iron (lll) citrate and Potassium ferricyanide. To create a cyanotype print you will have to collect a number of different objects, for example leaves and sticks. Then you will have to get a piece of cyan-blue print and place it on the floor in the sun. Thirdly, place the objects on top of the print in the sun and leave it for about 20 minutes then remove the objects from the print and take the print and place it in a tray of water for 5 minutes. Where the objects were on the print, it should go white and the background should be a darker blue.

Anna Atkins

• Anna Atkins (March 16th 1799 – June 9th 1871) was an English photographer and was noted for her earlier use of photography for scientific purposes. Furthermore, she was often considered as the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. She was also interested in the cyanotype process devised by Herschel in 1842, which can produce an image by what is commonly known as sun-printing.

Susan Derges

• Susan Derges is an English photographic artist, who was born in 1955. She specialised in camera-less photographic processes. After studying painting for 3 three years at the Chelsea College of Art and Design and then studied at Slade School of Art for two years, she then turned to photography. Susan Derges first experiment with camera-less photography while living in Japan. She explored early photographic techniques of camera-less photography. She exposed images directly onto photographic paper. Her methods have been consistently experimental, a constant search for new camera-less methods of recording imagery, including the photogram.

Linda McCartney

• Linda McCartney (September 24th 1941 – April 17th 1998) was an American musician, photographer, animal rights activist, and was married to Paul McCartney. She started work as a receptionist for Town and Country magazine. Furthermore, she was the only unofficial photographer on board the SS Sea Panther yacht who was allowed to take photographs of The Rolling Stones.

Zeva Oelbaum

• Zeva Oelbaum is a New York based filmmaker and photographer. She is also interested in the intersection between found objects, history and culture. Two monographs of her work have been published. They are, Flowers in Shadows: A Photographer Re-discovers a Victorian Botanical Journal and Blue Prints: The Natural World in Cyanotype Photographs. These two monographs were published in 2002.

My Cyanotype

Experiment of cyanotypes

Final outcome

Motion and Light Photography: Light Graffiti

• Light painting, also known as light writing, is a photographic technique in which exposures are made by moving a hand-held light source like a glow stick, sparklers, torch or little LED lights. Light painting photography started on the year 1914, when Frank Gilbreth and his wife used small lights and the open shutter of the camera to track the motion of manufacturing and clerical workers.

• By moving the light source, the light can be used to selectively illuminate parts of the subject or to "paint" a picture by shining it directly into the camera lens. Light painting requires a slow shutter speed, usually a second or more. Light painting can take on the characteristics of a quick pencil sketch.

• Man Ray was the first photographer to use the technique of light painting and in 1935. He created a series called “Space Writing”.

Gjon Mili

• Gjon Mili was an Albanian-American photographer (28th November 1904 – 14th February 1984). He his best known for his work published in LIFE, which he photographed artists such as Pablo Picasso. In 1939, Mili started to work as a photographer for LIFE. He was a pioneer in the use of stroboscopic instruments to capture a sequence of actions in one photo. Furthermore, Mili was one of the first to use electronic flash and stroboscopic light to create photographs that had more than a scientific interest. He used it for dance, sport and also theatre.

• “Time could truly be made to stand still. Texture could be retained despite sudden violent movement.”

Vicki De Silva

• Vicki De Silva is an American artist born in 1960. She had been producing light painting photography since 1980. She is credited with the term ‘light graffiti.’ Also, she is the first artist to make deliberate text light graffiti photos. Furthermore, she was also the first artist to use four and eight foot fluorescent lamps.

Shoot Plan

• For this shoot, I intend to take photographs of light writing by asking a friend to write or draw something with different types of light sources. To do this, I will have to set a SLR camera with the ISO of 200, the lowest aperture the possible and a long shutter speed. The longer the shutter speed the better. As I only own a compact camera, I might have to use one of the college’s SLR cameras. The equipment I will need for this shoot is an SLR camera, a light source, glow sticks and someone to write words or draw with the glow sticks.

Images that are similar to what I want to try:

Contact sheets

Best Image

I like this image because you can clearly see the light writing (the heart) and you can’t see the person drawing it, which I think makes it look better.

Furthermore, I think it worked well because I was taken in a studio with the lights off and it was darker than it is when you are outside. Sometimes when you do light writing outside you get the street lights which light up the person as well as seeing the writing or picture.

Photographs taken from home

These photos have been taken with a compact Samsung camera.

This was done on Bonfire night as people were lighting sparklers and either writing their name or making circles or making weird shapes.

These photos are quite good as you can see the circle clearly and you can see the person creating that circle with the sparkler.

These two photos aren’t that good as they are out of focus.

Evaluation of own Shoot

• The original intention of the shoot was to ask a friend or someone in my class to write or draw something in the air or in a studio, when it’s dark or with the lights off and to use different light sources.

• To carry out the intention of the project we went outside went it was dark, which was about 5pm. The equipment we needed for this shoot was LED lights or glow sticks and an SLR camera. Then we just got someone to make a shape or write something slowly in the air and then capture with the camera settings on BULB. Bulb means that the shutter is open as long as you want until you lift your finger off the button.

• My ideas did change a bit throughout the shoot as I was going to glow sticks as I didn’t have any LED lights. However, when you used the glows sticks to write something they weren’t captured on the camera, this could be because they weren’t bright enough.

• The things that could be improved on are that I could of taken more picture and try to write different things because we didn’t really write much it was more light drawing instead of light writing.

• The thing that was successful about this shoot was that the most of the pictures came out really well and you could see what we writing or drawing using the LED lights.

• The things that I learnt about is that the slower you write or draw the clearer and bolder the picture will be. Also, if you do the shape over and over again it also makes it bolder.

Scanography

• Scanography, more commonly referred to as scanner photography, is the process of capturing digitized images of different found objects for the purpose of creating printable art using a flatbed “photo” scanner with a charge-coupled device array capturing device.

• The term of scanography is formerly referred to medical scanning but is unrelated in either purpose of technique.

Shoot Plan

• What I plan to do for my own scanography shoot is my phone cover my as it is a penguin.

• As the scanner is not working we are having to take a photo of what we plan to do on the scanner. We will take the photo by camera.