Allen Schill
Still-Life Photography

Photograms and Cliché-Verre 

Various experiments in making images by non-photographic means - sometimes by putting certain materials on top of a piece of photographic paper, and sometimes by projecting onto the paper a piece of film, somehow manipulated.  The first method is essentially the classic cliché-verre of Surrealist tradition, and is limited mainly one's imagination in choice of materials. 

The second is oddly related to photomicrography and other scientific imaging systems.  In its emphasis on overall expansive pattern, it resembles some abstract painting, and has a lot do with abstractionism in general.  It is not pretending to be truly scientific, but only to celebrate science, or rather the mystic truth that science investigates.  (It's strangely closer to alchemy in a way, in that materials are combined and manipulated in some way to produce a pattern.  The oldest examples here are exercises in what I invented for myself and termed "pyrography", in which I carefully burned or melted 35mm transparencies, and then enlarged them in the darkroom.)

These practices have a long and fascinating history.  Fox Talbot made what he termed photogenic drawings of plant material to serve as specimens for botanical studies.  In 1843, Anna Atkins created the first book to be illustrated with photographs - or, to be precise, cyanotype photograms of algae and other botanical material.  The term "cliché verre" is used at times interchangeably with "photogram", but properly it denotes something else. It was originally a way of making multiple copies of drawings executed with a tool such as a stylus  on a sheet of glass coated with a waxy, opaque substance - the drawing-on-glass was put in contact with photographic paper and exposed to light.  (I've seen a beautiful landscape with figures by Corot - "Young Mother at the Entrance to a Wood" - in which the artist seems scarcely at a disadvantage to have only a stylus in hand instead of a pencil or charcoal.)  Using the cliché verre technique, the great writer Bruno Schulz created, in the early 1920s, a series of very fine graphics he called "The X Book of Idolatry".  Many artists of the modern era experimented as well with photograms (by whatever name - Rayographs, Schadowgraphs, etc.) or cliche verre, sometimes elaborating the techniques with considerable inventiveness.

The following is part of an artist's statement I wrote not too long ago:

Photograms and Cliché-Verre, by Allen Schill

– This section consists of examples of small series, experiments, and one-of-a-kind works, mostly done years ago:  photograms (in black-and-white and color, made with a variety of techniques), and a few other items. There is not much to say about them except that, as far as they may seem from the other bodies of work I am presenting on this site, the underlying impulses are much the same. They are here just to suggest a little of what I’ve done in what now seems like the remote past, things I rarely think about except in relation to what I’m doing now, things that didn’t develop into major areas of activity but which I still thought worth showing.

– Photograms and Cliché-Verre were made variously from magazine pages made translucent with oil, carefully-burned transparencies, acetate sheets painted or applied with translucent color, textured plastic, patterns of ink and oil formed spontaneously on a glass surface, chemical crystals on glass, and glass and plastic objects. Some these last are quite like the classic photograms of old, others closer to the idea of my mandalas and other work that tends toward biomorphic suggestion, still others closer to my photographic work concerned with texture and pattern.  Some involved resting objects directly on the photographic paper to make the exposure, while with others I projected something from the enlarger to the paper as if it were a negative.  One small group goes back to when I was about seventeen:  I experimented with the controlled burning or melting of photographic slides, which I called pyrography.  It may owe something to certain manifestations of the 1960s, such as the film “Fantastic Voyage”.  A couple of other examples come from my wish to use color photographic paper to make non-photographic images using translucent plastic or dyes instead a negative – creating the printing negative by hand, in effect.

– It is odd but at the same time unsurprising that, when I look back at what I did when I was young (or even very young), and when I notice what I notice now, I realize that my most basic interests are still there, essentially unchanged, only deepened.  In a way I have not had many new conceptions, I have just found ever more ways of working with ones most fundamental to me.  This is not mere intransigence; in fact I have duly considered many more possiblities than I have (or could have) carried out, always choosing what seemed most worthwhile.  I keep coming back, drawn irresistibly, to the same things, and I am satisfied to recognize these attractions as authentic.

Allen Schill

December 2009

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