Expired 1919, 2023
Alison Rossiter
Yossi Milo Gallery
Throughout the 18th century, scientists experimented with light-sensitive materials in order to reproduce patterns and images from the real world. German physicist Johann Heinrich Schulze temporarily imprinted the shapes of letters onto a glass bottle, thanks to an alchemical process involving silver nitrate, chalk, and the sun. English physicist Thomas Wedgwood applied silver nitrate to leather and paper and similarly failed to “fix” any permanent composition. Throughout such early attempts at photography, the focus was not on the camera, but on chemistry and permanence.
It’s easy to forget about the medium’s scientific origins and challenges, especially in the digital age. Yet a number of modern and contemporary photographers keep these historical experiments alive as they try their own hands at aesthetic alchemy. As the public’s trust in photography as a replica of reality erodes due to AI and digital editing, these photographers emphasize the value of photography as a creative tool, rather than a record. Following last fall’s “Man Ray: When Objects Dream” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a slew of new exhibitions are popping up focusing on the enduring popularity of camera-less photography.
Rayograph, (grater, film reel), 1929-1930
Man Ray
Robert Klein Gallery
Untitled Rayograph from "12 Rayographs 1921-1928", 1928
Man Ray
Daniel/Oliver
“Artists who work in camera-less modes are often drawn to the medium’s ability to foreground process and materiality,” Natasha Egan, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, told Artsy. “By removing or altering the camera, they engage photography at its most elemental—light, time, surface—while also questioning ideas of authorship, representation, and control.”
The museum’s current show, “MoCP at Fifty: Collecting Through the Decades,” on view through May 16th, features photograms by historical artist Bertha E. Jaques, who placed botanical specimens on light-sensitive paper, “reflecting an interest in the direct, indexical trace of the natural world and the ability of light to register form without the mediation of a camera,” Egan said.
Photograms in art history
Untitled, ca. 1900
Bertha Evelyn Jaques
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Untitled, 1948
Evelyn Statsinger
Richard Gray Gallery
In 1920s Paris, Man Ray placed everyday objects like thumbtacks, wire coils, and a comb on photosensitive paper and exposed them to light. Their outlines blurred and bled into each other, presenting uncanny new compositions. The artist called these pieces “rayographs,” and their dreamy appearance fit easily with the work coming out of his Dada and Surrealist circles.
During the next decade, avant-garde artists fled Europe and took their techniques with them. Hungarian polymath László Moholy-Nagy landed in Chicago, where he founded the New Bauhaus. He and his cohort explored the properties of light and perception using similar processes to those of Man Ray. He called such works “photograms,” and the term stuck. Moholy-Nagy’s legacy lived on in the city, where artists like Evelyn Statsinger added a whimsical sensibility to her own photograms.
Photogram, 1941
László Moholy-Nagy
Guggenheim Museum
Photograms today
Irene Papaefthemiou, associate director at The Photography Show, is intimately familiar with the form: She’s a working photographer who makes her own photograms, with and without color negatives. Papaefthemiou noted a few camera-less presentations at this year’s fair, which takes place from April 22nd to 26th at New York’s Park Avenue Armory.
Marshall Gallery, for instance, is showing chromogenic photograms by Fabiola Menchelli, which the artist folds into geometric abstractions in sculptural relief. They’re imbued, says Papaefthemiou, “with color and light streams, both referring to the origins of camera-less photographic works while expanding the bounds of our familiarity with this process.”
On a more historical note, Edwynn Houk Gallery is showing a rayograph that Man Ray made using a lightbulb, while Glitterman Gallery showcases a different camera-less technique. In its booth, a print by Jean-Pierre Sudre used the artist’s Mordançage process, in which bleach and other chemicals etch lines into photographs. “Titled Matériographie, the print has an element of relief through the utilization of crystals on glass plates which the artist then exposed and toned on gelatin silver paper,” Papathemiou said.
Although photograms are now a traditional technique, artists are using them in new ways that simultaneously honor and undercut photographic conventions. Bryan Graf began seriously working with photograms as a Yale graduate student in 2008. He’d also worked with the form in college, before the popularization of digital photography.
“It’s one of the first things you learn,” he said. “You put your hand on a sheet of paper, expose it to light from the enlarger, and then see the trace of your hand when you run it through the chemistry. It’s the first little bit of magic that happens.” The artist had been collecting physical objects from the sites he photographed, and unsure what to do with them, he returned to these educational roots.
Notably, he set up his own darkroom in his garage. He worked with chemistry trays but no enlarger, creating his own laboratory just like the 18th century scientists did, but with the knowledge of a 21st century MFA graduate. “I started again with the most fundamental aspects of photography,” he said, “which is light hitting light-sensitive paper, and recording its trace.” Graf’s photograms of roadside wildflowers have appeared in the New York Times, and in his meta-series “Shot Reverse Shot,” Graf created a simultaneous exposure of himself making these photograms.
Sun Room Canopy Debris II, 2016
Bryan Graf
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Sun Room Canopy Debris III, 2016
Bryan Graf
Yancey Richardson Gallery
Artist Mariah Robertson similarly embraces the private, choreographic nature of darkroom work. Years ago, she got fed up with macho, elitist vibes at camera shops and in magazine shoots that objectified the female form. And of course, there were the inherent power imbalances of taking other people’s pictures. “It’s controlling. I always say dehumanizing,” she said.
Robertson did away with the camera and began orchestrating her own spontaneous performances in the darkroom. To make the photograms on view in “Portraits,” her recent solo show at CHART in New York, the artist shaped light with her hands and a piece of cardboard as it came through a color enlarger. She made exposures of two seconds each, resulting in a series of colorful curves that appear to echo each other. The artist describes the process like “gambling” and being “blindfolded”; she can only guess at how her shapes will interact before she develops the paper. Ultimately, what’s important to her is this nebulous process, not the works that hang on the walls. About how the final pieces turn out, she says: “I don’t give a shit. But some of them look nice.”
Photographers embrace the democracy of the medium
Nearby the Photography Show, an exhibition featuring a different kind of camera-less photography technique is on view at the International Center of Photography, where “HARD COPY NEW YORK” is open through May 4th. The exhibition highlights the photocopy, a camera-less process familiar to anyone who worked in an ’90s office. Every work in the show is a photocopied image that’s been “reinterpreted and remediated,” said the show’s co-curator, David Campany.
The featured artists include major photographers such as Ryan McGinley, Collier Schorr, Stephen Shore, and Thomas Ruff, and the artworks range from copies of street and fashion photography to performance documentation and landscapes. “All the works in the exhibition are pinned, unframed,” Campany said. “This emphasizes their material fragility but also their democracy. If anything gets damaged (it hasn’t been so far), it’s pretty straightforward to reprint.”
Experiments with paper
Other artists experiment with surprising materials when creating their photographic works. Alison Rossiter, who recently closed her solo show “Semblance” at Yossi Milo Gallery, celebrates expired photo paper throughout her practice. After years of working in traditional black-and-white photography, she started making photograms in 1984, using domestic cleaning product bottles. In 2003, she began “drawing” with pen lights on photo paper.
Rossiter’s practice took a significant turn in 2007, when she experimented with Eastman Kodak Kodabromide E3 photo paper, which had a use-by date of 1946. “The results were so startling that I began a relentless search for old photographic papers to see what time had done to these light-sensitive materials,” she said.
E. Crumiere, Ardex, manufactured ca. 1930s, processed 2023, 2025
Alison Rossiter
Yossi Milo Gallery
Rossiter now collects and processes photographic papers from every decade of the twentieth century. She mounts these papers in frames and further honors them as she researches what happened at the moments of their production and expiration. Rossiter’s practice has allowed her to “stumble into both abstract photography and the history of photographic industrial production,” she said. “My unique prints are abstract records of time,” she said.
Experiments with chemicals
It’s not just photographers who are drawn to photography’s transformative properties. Nat Faulkner, whose solo show “Strong water” recently closed at London’s Camden Art Centre, initially worked in sculpture. He didn’t own a camera, and cared little about producing lasting images.
“I was more interested in chemistry, transformation and the spatial considerations that accompany the darkroom,” he said. He now approaches his sculptural practice with a “photographic sensibility.” In the exhibition, he filled a glass skylight with iodine (a light-sensitive substance used to make early daguerreotypes), to bathe the space in an orange hue. Over time, the orange color washed out thanks to the substance’s instability.
Overall, Faulkner is interested in practices that uncover something new yet “resist optimization.” “There is a propensity in photography for discovery,” he said. “I hope that that excitement clings to the work.”
Artists, whether they call themselves photographers or not, are embracing the past—its photo papers, chemicals, art history, and copy machines—and finding something entirely new. It’s a celebration of the infinite possibilities of artists’ most basic material: light.
