About The Photograms
“When are we going to make real photographs?” a fortyish guy in a tired suit was complaining, “this isn't what I signed up for”. I was a 27 year old with a lot of unruly hair who didn't even own a sport coat. It was 1975 and I was teaching an evening class in beginning photography. It was the second class, and I had just been teaching the students how the darkroom worked. As they didn't have negatives to print yet, I had had them making photograms by placing objects on photographic paper and then using the enlarger light to create shadows that were recorded on the photographic the paper. I had gotten involved in what they were doing, trying to get them to make more interesting images, and found myself, at the end of the class, spontaneously giving an unplanned photogram assignment. “Do you make photograms? Huh? I bet you don't” the tired suit was saying. I had to admit I didn't. In fact I was surprised to realized that I had never made a photogram in my life. I had admired and been fascinated by them, but somehow had never made even one. It was then I decided I'd make photograms – real photographs or not.
It was slow going at first, a lot harder than I thought it would be to make anything I was satisfied with, but I kept coming back to it. Plants became the primary elements. The images in my mind eventually divided into three groups, Plant Specimens, Gardens and Landscapes. I almost never made real photographs of gardens or landscapes but those are what became the subjects of these imagined photographs. Even the plant specimens were often imagined – composites of parts from different plants.
Eventually I settled in on a method. I'd gather material, which I grew on my roof or collected on trips to the country and beach. I'd fill vases with live plants, then I'd dry them and press them for later work. One summer I got to work in a darkroom on Shelter Island, but mostly back at home I'd lay out sheets of white drawing paper all over my studio and living room and spend a week or two composing the pictures on them with the stuff I'd collected. Then I'd start printing. The images with the black grounds are the original “negative” photograms, the ones with the white grounds are contact prints from those “negatives”. After I'd made a batch of original “negative” photograms I'd print back and forth, negative to positive to negative and so on, sometimes adding elements along the way. The hand painting came later, after contemplating the prints. I sometimes made series and variations of the same image, which was something else that wasn't quite real photography, as I had learned to think about it.
March, 2013
IMAGE: Garden 1, 1979 (detail)