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Abstractions

Rather than associate representation with the marks created on the paper by the action of light, some photographers are more concerned with abstraction. They might see the the photogram as a means of painting with light on the paper, using light to create marks on the paper rather than printing the shadows, outlines and transparency of objects. They see the final print not as a image but as an object. This stems from the significant difference between photography and painting where a painting is seen as a thing in itself, unlike the photograph which is seen as an image of something else.

Although the camera can be used to abstract subject matter, using techniques where the images become obscure through selective focus placing areas out of focus, or framed extremely close up etc. they still remain images of things that existed.

It is argued that the history of photography is the history of its subject matter and that the process has always related to the co-opting of a subject matter rooted in reality.

In all its manifestations, the photogram stands out side this. The historian Beaumont Newhall for instance saw the photogram as an area of abstract painting. During a period from the late 1940s abstract painting replaced the conventional subject with something more tactile, it concerned itself with paint as the subject. In the same way light can be seen as the subject for the photogram. It is interesting to note that many art historians talk of the way painters like Cluade Lorraine, Rubens etc. used light. In fact they only used light to see what they were doing; they actually used paint to give an illusion of light in the painting. It is more true to say artists like Moholy Nagy used light to make photograms. Artists like Nagy, who was part of the Bauhaus launched in 1919 by Gropius used the photogram to explore ideas of simplicity and functionalism asymmetrical in their compositions. They were more concerned with the interrelationship of marks on the photographic paper than what they might mean or represent.

In the most abstract sense, a photogram is the manifestation of electromagnetic radiation, a trap that catches the actions of a phenomena moving at 186,000 miles per second, and references it on the page.

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