The Origins of "Photography"
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IN 1839, A BRITISH ASTRONOMER NAMED SIR JOHN HERSCHEL COINED THE TERM "PHOTOGRAPHY"
IT CAN BE TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK WORDS ΦΩ͂Σ (PHŌS MEANING " ," AND ΓΡΑΦΉ (GRAPHÉ) MEANING " ." |
Cameraless Techniques Using Sunlight:
Cyanotypes
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History of Cyanotypes
The cyanotype process, also known as the blueprint process, was first introduced by John Herschel (1792 – 1871) in 1842. Sir John was an astronomer, trying to find a way of copying his notes. Herschel managed to fix pictures using hyposulphite of soda as early as 1839. He gave us the words photography, negative, positive and snapshot.
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Cyanotypes were one of the first non-silver technologies used to create photographic images. It was not initially utilized in mainstream until it was introduced at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition as a method to reproduce architectural drawings.
Anna Atkins (1799–1871) was the first woman photographer. Referred to sparingly by traditional photo historians, she made beautiful cyanotype images of algae, ferns, feathers, and waterweeds. Her botanist father, John George Children, and Herschel were friends, and the Atkins and Herschel families resided only 30 miles apart in Kent, England. Although there is no conclusive evidence that Herschel was Atkins’s mentor it is more than probable that she learned the cyanotype process in the Herschel household.
Anna Atkins made thirteen known versions of her work entitled British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843–1853). These books, containing hundreds of handmade images, were the very first published works to utilize a photographic system for purposes of scientific investigation and illustration. Significantly, they were initiated and created prior to Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844–1846), a published work that is generally given credit by historians as the first to have achieved this important milestone. |
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How to Create a Cyanotype
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Get Inspired!
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Dornith Doherty: Archiving Eden
Doherty traveled to the North Pole to visit the Svalbard Vault, a holding place not dissimilar to the idea of Noah’s Ark for plants where “individuals and governments from around the world are collaborating to create the first truly global botanical back-up system, but also, the gravity of climate change and political instability has created the need for an inaccessible “Doomsday Vault” near the North Pole.” Doherty’s research of these seed reserves has taken her all over the globe. In addition to her documenting these spaces, she has produced almost celestial interpretations of seeds created from digital collages of x-ray images of thousands of seeds, plantlets and clones.
Sonya Clark: Finding Freedom
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“Sonya Clark is an artist who uses everyday materials to create installations that coincide with national conversations about racism, violence and who ‘owns’ history in the United States,” said Amy Moorefield, the director of the Phillips Museum of Art's Dana Gallery. Clark's large-scale fabric installation is currently hanging in the gallery for her exhibit “Sonya Clark: Finding Freedom.” She is currently a professor of art and the history of art at Amherst College and was born in Washington, D.C.
Clark became interested in the Phillips county’s relationship with the Underground Railroad. She chose a “cyanotype” fabric that turns blue when exposed to sunlight while objects – in this case seeds – placed pre-exposure leave white shadows. “She placed the seeds in constellation patterns and let the sun process occur,” Moorefield said. “The work explores how people who migrated north along the Underground Railroad to find freedom used the constellations to navigate,” Moorefield said. “What she’s creating for us is actually a night sky.” The fabric – a series of cyanotype prints sewn together – unfolds to about 1,500 square feet and encompasses the Dana Gallery’s entire ceiling. The exhibit includes stargazing chairs, a furniture design that originated in Africa, and blacklight flashlights to illuminate the constellations. “I gained an appreciation for craft and the value of the handmade primarily from my maternal grandmother, who was a professional tailor,” Clark has said. “Many of my family members taught me the value of a well-told story and so it is that I value the stories held in objects.” For more at the Phillips, visit the museum. SEE MORE ON SONYA CLARK AT THE PHILLIPS MUSEUM OF ART 
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The photograms in this exhibition are made with music cassette tapes he physically disassembled. In some, the plastic cases form austere grids; in others, spools of unwound tapes have been strewn over the surface of the paper in loops and twists, recalling canvases by Twombly or Pollock. The titles of these works, including Allover (Dixie Chicks, Nat King Cole and Others) and Allover (LeVert, Barbara Streisand and Others), derive from the specific tapes used in making each image. Marclay’s artistic practice is grounded in the area between sight, sound, and all manner of recordings, whether visual or aural. His overall body of work spans sculpture, video, photography, music, performance and collage. His photograms reinvigorate two nearly-forgotten media: the cassette tapes of the 1970s and 80s and the cyanotypes of the 1840s.
To the Last Syllable of Recorded Time
To the Last Syllable of Recorded Time
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Weil and Rauschenberg met as art students in Paris, where they boarded at the same rooming house and skipped classes to visit museums together. Weil had already enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and Rauschenberg followed suit, studying for the 1948–49 academic year and returning for stretches during 1951 and ’52. Just prior to moving to New York City, they spent the summer of 1949 at the Weil family’s vacation home on Outer Island, Connecticut, where Weil introduced Rauschenberg to the blueprint process—which she had learned in childhood—and where the two were married the following June. Over the course of several years, they used the technique to collaborate on a relatively extensive body of works. A model (sometimes one of the artists themselves) and elements including foliage, textiles, and common household objects were laid down on a sheet, which was exposed with an ultraviolet bulb. In their de-skilled photographic technique, one-to-one scale, association with the plane of the floor, and the overall performative nature of the process, the blueprints laid the groundwork for years of experimentation by both artists.
The blueprint technique is also memorable for its wide range of reference: It looked to the past, not only to the cyanotype’s presence in the early development of photography but to the veritable dawn of culture, in that it echoes the frequent appearance of simple outlines of the human form, specifically handprints, in Paleolithic cave paintings. At the same time, it was connected to the present, even at its most terrifying: Those silhouetted figures evoke the descriptions, as in John Hersey’s famed 1946 New Yorker piece on Hiroshima, of human silhouettes burned onto walls and facades by the blast from the atom bomb.
The blueprint technique is also memorable for its wide range of reference: It looked to the past, not only to the cyanotype’s presence in the early development of photography but to the veritable dawn of culture, in that it echoes the frequent appearance of simple outlines of the human form, specifically handprints, in Paleolithic cave paintings. At the same time, it was connected to the present, even at its most terrifying: Those silhouetted figures evoke the descriptions, as in John Hersey’s famed 1946 New Yorker piece on Hiroshima, of human silhouettes burned onto walls and facades by the blast from the atom bomb.
Robert Rauschenberg holding a blueprint by Susan Weil and himself in their West Ninety-Fifth Street apartment, New York, 1951. Photo: Wallace Kirkland/Wallace Kirkland papers, [0062_0L11C_0004], Special Collections and University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago. © Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. © Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
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Edd Carr has created what may be the first cyanotype video. He was commissioned by Globe town Records in London to make a music video for Tycho Jones, and did so making over 5000 frames in cyanotypes and animating them. The music is melodic and has a nice beat and the cyanotypes are stunning. The video also deals thematically with birds and their relation.
"I am an independent artist from North Yorkshire, UK, primarily working with moving image and analogue photography. I have worked with alternative processes for a number of years, adapting them into moving image format. My work mostly deals with our anxieties around the ecological crisis, and the sixth mass extinction of life. By using tactile analogue processes, I try to create a link between the material nature of the work and the thematic content. For example, my film Here Comes the Wildfire! was printed entirely in the sun using the lumen printing method, on expired Ilford paper. I studied Marine and Natural History Photography at Falmouth University, and recently completed a Master’s in Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. Prior to this, I was a dog walker in the North York Moors National Park." Ed Carr, 2021
"I am an independent artist from North Yorkshire, UK, primarily working with moving image and analogue photography. I have worked with alternative processes for a number of years, adapting them into moving image format. My work mostly deals with our anxieties around the ecological crisis, and the sixth mass extinction of life. By using tactile analogue processes, I try to create a link between the material nature of the work and the thematic content. For example, my film Here Comes the Wildfire! was printed entirely in the sun using the lumen printing method, on expired Ilford paper. I studied Marine and Natural History Photography at Falmouth University, and recently completed a Master’s in Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art. Prior to this, I was a dog walker in the North York Moors National Park." Ed Carr, 2021
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Lumen Prints (Solar Photograms)
Anthotypes
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Cameraless Techniques Using Enlarger Light:
Photograms
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Man Ray's "Rayograph" Man Ray began making photographs in the 1920s, in the midst of the Dada movement. Through an accident in the darkroom, he soon discovered a new means of creating photos without a camera.
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Get Inspired!
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Cameraless Techniques Using Scanners:
Photomontages
Janet Dwyer
Scanography
Scanography Experiments:
Objects that sit farther from the surface of the flatbed will create a shallow depth of field.
When the lid is not tightly closed a gradient will occur.
Black or Colored backgrounds can be placed above the objects.
Moving the objects while scanning is in progress will also create motion blur.
Objects that sit farther from the surface of the flatbed will create a shallow depth of field.
When the lid is not tightly closed a gradient will occur.
Black or Colored backgrounds can be placed above the objects.
Moving the objects while scanning is in progress will also create motion blur.
Chemigram
The chemigram is a combination of both painting and photography, and lies within the general domain of experimentation in the visual arts. It requires the use of materials from silver halide-based photography (light-sensitive paper, developer, and fixer), but it is not a photograph. Like the photogram, the chemigram is made without a camera, yet it is created in full light instead of in the darkness of the darkroom.
Johann Schulze
Luminogram
The light is modulated by varying the intensity through distance from the photosensitive surface, the power of the light source, or by the use of filters or gels or motion of the light. The paper can itself be shaped to create the desired effects in the final image.
László Moholy-Nagy
