Sensitive
Materials that can be used to make photograms & other potentials
While most photograms are made with standard black
and white photographic paper, the Photogram is a process that lends
itself to experimenting and in terms of materials, the limiting factor
is only one's imagination.
Colour
negative paper:
While we are most familiar with this paper through labs that
process our colour snapshots, because it has to be processed
in complete darkness it requires more specific equipment for
processing. While it is more difficult if not impossible to
see where and how the objects are placed on the paper, the process
of making colour photograms becomes a random and tactile experience.
However the objects can be placed on a sheet of glass with the
light on and the paper slipped under in darkness for the exposure.
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These materials
can be processed both manually in a dark tube or a continuous feed
processor. The materials are less readily available but can be purchased
through a photographic company like Agfa, Kodak or Fuji.
While the contrast of the
paper is constant, the colour of the final print can be altered dramatically
by using the filters on the enlarger. It is a negative process which
means the areas which received the most light will record as the darkest,
and the colours projected will reverse in the processing. Depending
on the filtration used in the enlarger, a red bottle might reproduce
as cyan. However there are some
other factors that come into play: colour neg paper has an over all
blue cast built in to compensate the tan base or orange colour that
is inherent in a colour neg. Because the red transparent object like
a bottle does not have this there would be a colour shift in the opposite
direction of the tan base which might have to be allowed for by altering
the colour filtration in the enlarger. Putting a clear piece of colour
film with the orange base on it in the neg carrier is also a way of
equalizing this shift.
However as the negative
colour representation produces an abstraction which is most often
an intrinsic part of the process, I tend to use the filters of the
enlarger in an extreme way to push the colour in a way that is not
done when making traditional colour prints. i.e. I might have the
filter wound up to cc180yellow 120 magenta. Most often I do double
exposures and would then do the other exposure at say 140cc cyan.
I have used this
material for the
Evidence from the Religion of Technology project.