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Shadowplay: Photography without a Lens
Photograms, Electrographs, Found Transparencies and the First Photographers
There were important precursors, but Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy is often credited for earning the photogram wider respectability as a legitimate art form. He was already exploring the possibilities of the process around the same time that he began teaching at the influential Bauhaus design school in 1923. This fertile creative community, then based in Weimar, encouraged experimentation with materials and processes. Often, artists and engineers worked closely together and blurred the boundaries between disciplines leading to simultaneous innovations in both fine art and industrial design.
A photogram is a way of printing with light and shadow by placing objects directly onto photographic paper in a darkroom and exposing the arrangement to light. The resulting shadow pattern is then developed in the same way as a photographic print, although no film, negative, or lens have been used in creating it. I would say no camera, but in the most literal meaning of the word, the darkroom has become the camera. The origin of the word ‘camera’ is from the Latin camera obscura — meaning ‘dark room’. The word ‘chambre’ is also derived from the Latin word camera.
