Luminogramm biography

Artwork made with photosensitive materials

For the medical imaging process, see Angiography.

A luminogram is an image, usually made with an artistic purpose, created by exposure of photosensitive materials to light without the intervention of an object.

She left Germany and emigrated to the United States to flee Nazi Germany. She lived in New York City for two decades and then lived in New Hampshire until her death. She is very well established for her portraits and from about until about she created a variety of photogram and luminogram images.

Technique

The luminogram is a variation on the photogram, made in the darkroom directly on photosensitive paper and chemically developed and fixed normally.

While the photogram employs the shadows of objects, in the luminogram the light is modulated by varying the intensity through distance from the photosensitive surface, by the power or shape of the light source, or tempered by filters or gels, or by moving the light, often a low-powered torch (flashlight).

The paper can itself be shaped to create the desired effects in the final image.

The photography theorist and practitioner of the luminogram Gottfried Jäger describes this as "the result of pure light design; the rudimentary expression of an interaction of light and photosensitive material… a kind of self representation of light."^[1]

History

Twentieth century

Many of László Moholy-Nagy's "photograms" were luminograms.

In the s, Moholy-Nagy, with his wife Lucia Moholy, began experimenting with photograms.

Otto Steinert - biography Otto Steinert came to photography as an interested layman and quickly developed into one of its most important and leading mediators. He conferred decisive impetus to German post-war photography with his subjective photography that continues to have an impact to this day.

He produced photogram and luminogram images from in Berlin and continuously until his death in Chronologically they decline into three groups:

• Berlin Bauhaus period (–)
• exile in London (–)
• exile in the United States (–)

Moholy-Nagy considered the "mysteries" of the light effects and the assessment of space as experienced through the photogram to be significant principles that he experimentally explored and advanced in his instruction throughout his life.^[2] 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 ), a device with moving parts meant to have light projected through it in order to make mobile light reflections and shadows on nearby surfaces.^[3][4]

Moholy-Nagy's luminograms are concerned exclusively with light and design.^{[citation needed]} Moholy-Nagy approached the light-sensitive photographic paper as a blank canvas and used beam to paint on the surface with and without the interference of an intervening object.^[5]

German immigrant to America Lotte Jacobi, encouraged by colleague Leo Katz, produced a large number of luminograms and , which she called Light Pictures using electric torches covered in fabric and candles to project light onto photographic paper with a dancing motion.^[6][7]

The experimental German fotoform group, from , produced luminograms,^[7] though their leader Otto Steinert^[8] and member Peter Keetman produced their abstract images by pointing a camera, with shutter open, at flash sources to produce light trails.

Another, Heinz Hajek-Halke, eliminated the camera.^[9]

Photographie Concrète^[10] was a movement first exhibited in in Bern, and comprised Swiss photographers, including Roger Humbert, who made luminograms first shown in Ungegenständliche Fotografie ('Nonrepresentational Photography'), in Basel, amongst René Mächler, Rolf Schroeter, Jean Frédéric Schnyder who each made camera-less imagery.^[11] 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.^[12]

Contemporary practice

Irish artist Martina Corry's series Colour Works () and Photogenic Drawings (), she folds and crumples photographic manuscript, then flattens it before revealing it to the light of the enlarger so that after development it retains photographic advocacy of folds on top of the actual folded photograph, and as Corry notes, “although abstract in appearance, the works document the history of their retain making”.^[13][14] In other works, such as Lumen and Luminograms (both ), 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 build of Harmonograms, achieved with a technique similar to Heidersberger's 'rhythmogrammes' (above).

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Their series entitled Luminograms from around to , are harmonograms of colours arranged in a concentric 'target' pattern and others made by illuminating direct-positive photographic paper to create an edge-to-edge gradated tone. The one-metre-square prints are then presented under the continuously-changing illumination of Cs LED light sources scrolling through the spectrum.

The arrangement perverts the human ability to perceive a colour as unchanging 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.^[15]

Oliver Chanarin and Adam Broomberg used the luminogram in their approach to imaging war, in a project The Day that Nobody Died ()^[16] in which they adopted the conceptual, pragmatic approach of exposing a roll of photographic paper directly to ‘front line’ Afghan light and filming British troops, with whom they were embedded, carrying the serious cardboard box containing it.^[17] 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.^[18][19] The work was included in the Tate Contemporary exhibition Conflict, Time, Photography November 26, March 15, ^[20]

British creator Mike Jackson developed a distinct aesthetic in using the luminogram process to create sculptural silver gelatin prints.

Photogram images prior to the avant-garde period between WWI and WWII can, in general, be considered traces, or documents of existing shape or form. The application of the concept of the photogram has its roots in the primordial moments of the history of chemical-based photography. During the first 19th century, as iron and silver based photographic processes were being tried, images were made by placing botanical specimens and delicate objects such as lace onto the chemically coated manuscript and exposing using sunlight. This was done as an alternative to drawing.

His decade elongated 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