LUMEN PRINT SERIES

LUMEN PRINT SERIES

Irish artist Martina Corry's series Colour Works (2008) and Photogenic Drawings (2000), she folds and crumples photographic paper, then flattens it before exposing it to the light of the enlarger so that after development it retains photographic representation of folds on top of the actual folded photograph, and as Corry notes, “although abstract in appearance, the works document the history of their own making”. 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. Photographie Concrète was a movement first exhibited in 1967 in Bern, and comprised Swiss photographers, including Roger Humbert, who made luminograms first shown in Ungegenständliche Fotografie ('Nonrepresentational Photography'), 1960 in Basel, amongst René Mächler, Rolf Schroeter, Jean Frédéric Schnyder who each made camera-less imagery. Another, Heinz Hajek-Halke, eliminated the camera. The experimental German fotoform group, from 1949, produced luminograms, though their leader Otto Steinert and member Peter Keetman produced their abstract images by pointing a camera, with shutter open, at light sources to produce light trails. German immigrant to America Lotte Jacobi, encouraged by colleague Leo Katz, produced a large number of luminograms 19, which she called Light Pictures using electric torches covered in fabric and candles to project light onto photographic paper with a dancing motion.

Moholy-Nagy approached the light-sensitive photographic paper as a blank canvas and used light to paint on the surface with and without the interference of an intervening object. Moholy-Nagy's luminograms are concerned exclusively with light and design. His luminograms are related to his sculptural experiments with projected light on his 'light modulator' machines starting with the Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne (completed 1930), a device with moving parts meant to have light projected through it in order to create mobile light reflections and shadows on nearby surfaces. Moholy-Nagy considered the 'mysteries' of the light effects and the analysis of space as experienced through the photogram to be important principles that he experimentally explored and advanced in his teaching throughout his life. Chronologically they fall into three groups: He produced photogram and luminogram images from 1922 in Berlin and continuously until his death in 1946. In the 1920s, Moholy-Nagy, with his wife Lucia Moholy, began experimenting with photograms. Many of László Moholy-Nagy's 'photograms' were luminograms. 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.' History Twentieth century The paper can itself be shaped to create the desired effects in the final image. 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 luminogram is a variation on the photogram, made in the darkroom directly on photosensitive paper and chemically developed and fixed normally.

Lumen print