Photograms, 1997
I decided to make photograms of precisely what is absent from the process of the Photogram, the camera and film. Photograms are made without a camera or negative film, by simply exposing the paper itself to light after placing an object on it. I make the absent camera and film the very subject of the photograms. To put it another way, the camera shadow stands for a semantic emptiness, in which shape, medium and representation all add up to zero. The strange shape is the cardboard film box, opened and flattened out. The background colors are coded to the colors of commercial film: red for Agfa, green for Fuji, yellow for Kodak, black for Ilford and blue for Polaroid.
I decided to make photograms of precisely what is absent from the process of the Photogram, the camera and film. Photograms are made without a camera or negative film, by simply exposing the paper itself to light after placing an object on it. I make the absent camera and film the very subject of the photograms. To put it another way, the camera shadow stands for a semantic emptiness, in which shape, medium and representation all add up to zero. The strange shape is the cardboard film box, opened and flattened out. The background colors are coded to the colors of commercial film: red for Agfa, green for Fuji, yellow for Kodak, black for Ilford and blue for Polaroid.
