Twentieth century Many of
László Moholy-Nagy's "photograms" were luminograms. In the 1920s, Moholy-Nagy, with his wife
Lucia Moholy, began experimenting with photograms. He produced photogram and luminogram images from 1922 in Berlin and continuously until his death in 1946. Chronologically they fall into three groups: • Berlin Bauhaus period (1923–1928) • exile in London (1935–1937) • exile in the United States (1937–1946) Moholy-Nagy considered the "mysteries" of the light effects and the analysis of space as experienced through the photogram to be important principles that he experimentally explored and advanced in his teaching throughout his life. His luminograms are related to his sculptural experiments with projected light on his 'light modulator' machines starting with the
Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne [Light Prop for an Electric Stage] (completed 1930), a device with moving parts meant to have light projected through it in order to create mobile light reflections and shadows on nearby surfaces. Moholy-Nagy's luminograms are concerned exclusively with light and design. Moholy-Nagy approached the light-sensitive photographic paper as a blank canvas and used light to paint on the surface with and without the interference of an intervening object. German immigrant to America
Lotte Jacobi, encouraged by colleague Leo Katz, produced a large number of luminograms 1946 and 1951, which she called
Light Pictures using electric torches covered in fabric and candles to project light onto photographic paper with a dancing motion. though their leader
Otto Steinert and member
Peter Keetman produced their abstract images by pointing a camera, with
shutter open, at light sources to produce light trails. Another,
Heinz Hajek-Halke, eliminated the camera. Photographie Concrète was a movement first exhibited in 1967 in
Bern, and comprised Swiss photographers, including Roger Humbert, who made luminograms first shown in
Ungegenständliche Fotografie ('Nonrepresentational Photography'), 1960 in Basel, amongst René Mächler, Rolf Schroeter, Jean Frédéric Schnyder who each made camera-less imagery. Associated with them was
Heinrich Heidersberger who made 'rhythmogrammes' with a machine devised to control the motion of a light globe swinging repeatedly across the surface of photographic paper to create looping and arrayed patterns.
Contemporary practice Irish artist Martina Corry's series
Colour Works (2008) and
Photogenic Drawings (2000), she folds and crumples photographic paper, then flattens it before exposing it to the light of the
enlarger so that after development it retains photographic
representation of folds on top of the actual folded photograph, and as Corry notes, “although
abstract in appearance, the works document the history of their own making”. In other works, such as
Lumen and
Luminograms (both 2004), she 'draws' directly on the paper using
optical fibres at varying distances from the surface of the
photographic emulsion. British duo, the husband and wife team Rob and Nick Carter make artworks in a range of media that are concerned with
visual perception. These include photograms, some made directly from
stained-glass windows in-situ, and also luminograms in the form of
Harmonograms, achieved with a technique similar to Heidersberger's 'rhythmogrammes' (above). Their series entitled
Luminograms from around 2007 to 2011, are harmonograms of colours arranged in a concentric 'target' pattern and others made by illuminating
direct-positive photographic paper to produce an edge-to-edge gradated tone. The one-metre-square prints are then presented under the continuously-changing illumination of C-200s
LED light sources scrolling through the spectrum. The arrangement perverts the human ability to perceive a
colour as constant even under changing lighting conditions. Instead, the static photographic prints themselves appear to change
hue perversely. The artworks have attracted the interest of
perceptual psychologists.
Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg used the luminogram in their approach to imaging war, in a project
The Day that Nobody Died (2008) in which they adopted the conceptual, pragmatic strategy of exposing a roll of photographic paper directly to ‘front line’ Afghan light and filming British troops, with whom they were embedded, carrying the heavy cardboard box containing it. The wittingly ludicrous video documentation of the journey of the box and the content-free, but suggestive, luminogram brings to the fore the legitimacy of art as a representation of the theatre of war. The work was included in the Tate Modern exhibition
Conflict, Time, Photography November 26, 2014 March 15, 2015. British artist
Mike Jackson developed a unique aesthetic in 2014 using the luminogram process to create sculptural silver gelatin prints. His decade long study of luminogram work has been exhibited in London ‘The Self Representation of Light’ and in New York ‘Birdsong’, and his book exploring the connection between his luminogram process and Edwin Abbott Abbott’s work ‘Flatland’ is part of the library collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington. ==References==