Taking a photo without a camera
I recently went to the temp exhibition Shadow Catchers at the V&A. It was really inspiring and it opened a new world of photography, which I had never considered before. At school I then had the opportunity to work in the dark room to create some very simple and basic photograms.
The results are all in black and white, plus since I cannot stop myself from using photoshop whenever I can, in colour are some manipulations of the images. Hope you like them as much as I do. x (click here or any of the photos to view them bigger on flickr):
The process is extremely simple: you have the light sensitive paper on a flat surface and work with red light (which won’t affect the paper). You then lay objects on top of the paper and turn on a white light above the composition for just a few seconds. This gets the areas hit by the light turn black / dark grey, whilst the areas that were in shadow will remain white, thus creating a black and white image of the outline of the objects.
Just in case you are trying to find out how to make a photogram and you have done the step above but still cannot see anything on the paper..In order to see your result you will need to keep working with the red safe light and ‘fix’ the image onto the paper with the right chemicals. Since I don’t know what chemicals are used to develop the photos, maybe you can try this link, which might help if you are trying to do it at home. Please do share links to your photograms if you have made some, I’d love to see what other people are doing. ^_^
