Photograms

Two of these are by Man-ray, one is by me.
I thought they looked good together, can you tell which is mine?

 We did photograms a few weeks ago now. Photograms are made in the dark room by projecting light onto photosensitive paper then developing the paper. The shadows caused by objects places on the paper stay white. Areas where the light hit the paper turn out black.

First, we made test strips by exposing the paper to two seconds of light then slightly covering it, exposing it for another two seconds and repeating along the strip. What should come out is a strip with about 5 or 6 obvious shades of monochrome. What I got was mostly black. We repeated the process but with only 0.5 seconds of exposure time per covering. That turned out very well! Sing the test strip we could tell that three to four seconds was the perfect exposure time to get a perfect black.

Various experiments using various objects including glass prisms and a slide carousel for a projector.
I really love how crisply the stripes in the top two images turned out.

We started getting creatively instantly when allowed to make our own photograms! The Dark room has a very exciting feel to it with the dark lights, projectors and chemicals that makes photographs magically appear a bit like Harry Potter. We photogrammed whatever we could get our hands on; Photography equipment, light bulbs, other classmate's glasses, even our own hands!

Once again, I've mixed together my own work and that of Man-Ray and László Moholy-Nagy.
This time, there's a theme of stripes!

The process is hugely experimental, quick and very gratifying, I find. It is no wonder surrealist artists such as Man-Ray jumped on it to start producing ambiguous monochrome arrangements out of household objects. I can definitely see myself wanting to do this process again in the future!