About Reimagined Photograms
Photograms are made by arranging stuff directly on a sheet of photographic paper and then turning on a light for a few seconds. The shadows made by the objects are thus recorded on the paper. In 2011 when I first scanned a group of photograms (silver prints & hand colored silver prints), made between 1976 & 1987, for the purpose of making enlarged digital prints from them, it became immediately obvious (and tempting) that I could now change more than the size. And so this group of work happened. Both in the process of making photograms and in the results I feel a similarity to collage, and sometimes even drawing. So it felt like a natural progression to add digital drawing to some images. And, in some of that drawing there is an obvious connection to my light drawings. The images in the Bottle Series are made by adding digital drawing to a digital copy of the same photogram of a bottle.
David Lebe, July 2017
IMAGE: Garden 1, 1979 (detail)