The Photogram - a History

“Captured Shadows”

“The shadows that things make The things that shadows make”

by

Les Rudnick

Photograms on non-paper surfaces

-tintypes
Tintype has been utilized as a medium for creating photograms of translucent clothing, mostly doll clothing. These dark and moody images have been created by Susan Seubert. One of her recent projects has been the making of photograms using the dry plate tintype process, also known as ferrotypes. Her images are both beautiful and haunting because of the combination of the relatively dark images combined with the unpredictably uneven coating texture inherent in the dry plate tintype process. Some of her images of dresses and gloves appear to be floating above a lunar landscape or as if the object had been photographed in motion using a panning technique to cause the background to blur while maintaining a sharp foreground image. [Seubert, Susan, "Memento Mori: The Camera-less Tintype" in Camera Arts, December 2005/January 2006, pp18-23.]

--photograms on ceramic
Thomas Wedgewood, was interested in the use of photography as a means to transfer a consistent image to the surface of ceramics very early in the development of photography. During the years between 1790 and 1795 he worked at using light to record images on chemically sensitized glass. This work was presented along with Sir Humphrey Davy to the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Essentially, this was a method of making a photogram on the surface of glass with the idea to use the glass plate in combination with light or heat to produce images on other objects such as leather, glass and ceramics.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysteries
It is the true source of art and science.
Albert Einstein