As the technical aspects of photography progressed,
film became more sensitive, and cameras with negatives were employed
the photogram process was largely forgotten.
However, around 1918 Christian Schad
rediscovered it calling it the Schardograph. During 1921-2.
Man Ray also rediscovered the technique
and found the unpredictability of the method, and also the fact that
it formed a negative image on the paper, ideal for the concepts of
the surrealist movement, where the abstraction of the dream was explored.
He called all his images made this way "Rayographs".
Other photographers and artists of the time also rediscovered this
means of creating images and each seemed to invent their own name
for the technique. The Vortograph was used by Alvin Langdon
Coburn for instance, the schadograph by Christian Schard.
Some of my images I have termed Godographs.
Since the 1930s photograms have been used by a
number of artists to create a range of visual effects, and like the
very nature of watching the photographic print appear on the page
as it develops, this technique holds the same intrigue.
A unique characteristic of the photogram is that
each image is a new discovery in it self. Generally, the images can
never be repeated as in the printing of normal photographs.
In his autobiography, self-portrait (Little, Brown
and Co in association with the Atlantic press, Boston, 1963, Andr'e
Deutsch London 1963) Man Ray describes the event that led to his rediscovery
of the photogram.
"Again at night I developed the last plates
I had exposed; the following night I set to work printing them. Besides
the trays and chemical solutions in bottles, a glass graduate and
thermometer, a box of photographic paper, my laboratory equipment
was nil. Fortunately, I had to make only contact prints from the plates.
I simply laid a glass negative on a sheet of light-sensitive paper
on the table, by the light of my little red lantern, turned on the
bulb that hung from the ceiling, for a few seconds, and developed
the prints. It was while making these prints that I hit on my Rayograph
process, or cameraless photographs. One sheet of photo paper got into
the developing tray - a sheet unexposed that had been mixed with those
already exposed under the negatives - I made my several exposures
first, developing them together later - and as I waited in vain a
couple of minutes for an image to appear, regretting the waste paper,
I mechanically placed a small glass funnel, the graduate and the thermometer
in the try on the wetted paper, I turned on the light: before my eyes
an image began to form, not quite a simple silhouette of the objects
as in a straight photograph, but distorted and refracted by the glass
more or less in contact with the paper and standing out against a
black background, the part directly exposed to the light. I remembered
when I was a boy placing fern leaves in a printing frame with proof
paper, exposing it to sunlight, and obtaining a white negative of
the leaves. This was the same idea, but with an added three-dimensional
quality and tonal gradation."
In response to Man Rays work Breton hailed it as " an art
richer in surprises than painting".
