Technical Methods, Materials, Workshop Practices
The original idea when considering photograms was to try and recreate some of the ink drawings I’ve done over the last few months partly as a way of seeing what it’s like to try a totally different method to theoretically “do the same thing” and partly to see what possibilities are created specifically by doing it in a non-linear or non-time-orientated process (as distinct from the very linear nature of drawing). These are three drawings from the series:
The pictures were all outlined in pen at first, using a circular stencil, and then the circles were filled in with acrylic ink, using a paintbrush. The size of the gap between circles was as carefully controlled as possible - using the stencil allowed me to place each one next to the last at a distance precise to a fraction of a millimetre just by eye. I built the perimeter of each hexagon, progressing anti-clockwise from the top centre until I met the beginning again and then continued inwards from the perimeter to fill the shape. The natural impossibility of arriving back in line with the initial circles (even carefully controlled parameters only go so far when applied to the human hand and eye) resulted in fractures in the shape which were then “ironed out” when building in from the edge. The idea was that the same process applied a number of times will always be different and that the series will map out a collection of snapshots from the range of space-filling possibilities.
The photogram recreations are going to be done by arranging pennies on a glass plate between the photo paper and the light source. The reason for the plate was so I’d be able to take a shot, then swap the exposed sheet for a new one, then rearrange the coins slightly and do another shot, etc. This process will differ from the hand-drawn method in a number of ways, and, structurally, the resulting images would be less tied to the procedure of following the perimeter round and committing each circle to its position on turn because the coins won’t be fixed in place - they will be dependent on larger movements of groups of coins pushing against each other with a knock-on effect.
During my first session in the dark room I shot a handful of small sheets and adjusted the settings on the enlarger a bit, so I could get a feel for the effects my adjustments were having.
I started by raising the glass plate off the backboard with a penny under each corner so as to get the shortest possible distance between the glass and the photo paper beneath, then arranged some coins in the middle. I then took my first two shots, adjusting the contrast in between them.
It seemed that I was right about getting the crisp edges - the ratio of the distance between light source and glass to the distance between glass and paper is related to the question of focus when enlarging negatives, but in the case of photograms, as there is no negative, the closer the glass suspending the coins is to the paper, the crisper the edges will be, (when enlarging a negative, the two distances need to be proportional to one another). Also, changing the contrast slightly made no visible difference, I think because the black areas of the paper was already getting really pretty saturated with light and couldn’t get much blacker.
I was very pleased with the level of clarity I managed so quickly - I felt I had already sort of immediately found my ideal way of producing these, but I wanted to get an idea of the sort of effect playing around with these distances would have, and some interesting things started happening...
The second pair of images were shot when the glass was raised off the board by a CD case on either side, instead of pennies (so, approximately 6x higher). It’s hard to tell with the quality of the scans I was able to upload to Tumblr but there are actually some thin black lines near the edge of the white circles, as if the adjacent circles have outlines a couple of millimetres from their own edges which are only visible in the white areas (they’re clearest just within the top of the upper of the two central circles). The only variable I changed before making this second pair was the height of the plate, so I am guessing this is caused by refraction through the glass.
For the third pair I added another 4 CDs on each side so at this point the plate was a good 3 or so inches higher then the paper. I also lowered the lightbulb to its maximum to push that ratio as far as it would go the other way. I knew there would be some form of blurring but I was quite surprised at how they came out:
It seemed to me that the lines in the second pair probably were indeed refraction and now in the third, the angle of that refraction has increased so the black circle outlines are wider and the edges are more spread out. Also, there is bleeding where the white circles touch each other; the small amount of light that can get past blurs the points of contact. The one on the left is darker because I increased the exposure time. I’ll have to do some practice balancing the contrast and exposure time because I’m interested first of all in heightening the clarity of the pictures, which I think will be done with maximum effective contrast (simply setting the light to its highest contrast level - with yellow at 0 and magenta at 100 - in practice I think won’t do it as it has to be relative to the exposure time)
Second of all I’m interested in the emergent nature of these fragments of outlines, and would really like to try and push that a little further. Those last two photograms reminded me strongly of particular works by two very interesting people, both of them among my favourite artists but between whom I hadn’t really seen a connection before: The American Linda Francis (1943-) and the Dutch artist and sculptor - and I think also architect/designer - Arie Jansma (1907-1992). I’m not sure because there’s almost nothing written about him online and little more offline it seems. But he appears to have been interested in crystal-like formations of small circles too and I think they might even have been photograms. Below are two of his pictures from the late 60s on the left, and an untitled drawing from 1992 by Linda Francis on the right:
The comparison with Francis’ drawing is, in a way, superficial because my blurred refractions came about in a very different way to her erased charcoal lines, but I did find the compositional similarities striking! A central part of her work at the time was about time-orientated processes, and in a sense that’s the very factor I’m trying to bypass by making photograms, but my drawing practice certainly owes her a lot.
The relevance of the Jansma pictures to mine, I think, is more significant because with his it’s the focus level, or ”resolution” and the positioning of the circles which together determine the individual shapes and cumulative effect of the “circles” themselves, and this I find very interesting (c.f. my last #technical methods 2017 post where I spoke about seeking to make work whose content is intrinsically also its method of creation).
I’m going back into the dark room tomorrow and if I’ve got time would like to try and do some recreations of drawings and also some refraction experiments, but first I’ll do some testing to get the contrast/exposure time balance clearer in my mind.












