Abstract and experimental photography, a very diverse category of images made using an assortment of techniques, and with equally varied intentions, but which have in common the avoidance of symbolic representation. Abstract photography rejects the idea that something identifiable must be depicted, preferring instead to take the image itself and the process of image making as its object. To achieve this, an abstract photograph may emphasize the internal structures of the image, visualize the invisible, or manifest pure visibility; contemporary photographers have also presented their work as wholly new objects that make no reference to anything outside their own existence, further emphasizing the self-referential nature of the image.
The creation of abstract images has often been undertaken as a form of visual research in order to understand better the principles and significance of images. Strictly speaking, abstract photography is defined by the techniques employed and the resulting effects, not necessarily the photographer's intention. Early examples include Henry Talbot's contact prints of plants made in the 1830s, and Étienne-Jules Marey's late 19th-century chronophotographs. As a self-conscious form of image making, however, abstract photography emerged in the early 20th century, as did abstract art generally, in response to pictorialism and the decades-long privileging of photography's documentary aspect; a growing interest in the occult also played a role. Alvin Langdon Coburn is generally considered to be the father of abstract photography, having first used the term in his 1916 essay ‘The Future of Pictorial Photography’, in which he suggests exhibiting work that emphasizes the form and structure underlying the image, rather than reference to anything outside the image. This exhibition never took place, but Coburn went on to make his Vortographs, exemplars of the new art form. (The first publicly exhibited abstract photographs were Erwin Quedenfeldt's (1869-1948) Symmetrical Patterns from Natural Forms, shown at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne.) In 1918 Christian Schad developed the photogram, which he called the Schadograph, a form of cameraless photography that lends itself to diverse creative intentions. A number of artists seized upon the photogram as a useful and expressive technique, including Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Franz Roh, and Lázsló Moholy-Nagy. Other experimental techniques that gained prominence in the first half of the 20th century include solarization, multiple exposure, cliché-verre, photomontage, and brûlage. Surrealism, Constructivism, and other art movements embraced these methods, and helped to promote abstract photography as an art form in its own right. By 1930 abstract photography was recognized as an international style, and one particularly redolent of modernism and the search for a new reality.
In the second half of the 20th century new theoretical approaches and technological developments increased the possibilities of abstract image making. After 1945 experimental photography flourished in West Germany, where radical new imagery suggested that a new order and understanding of society and the self was possible. In the 1950s Otto Steinert led the fotoform group in exploring the creative potential of abstract imagery under the label Subjective Photography. Through exhibitions, publications, and teaching, Steinert influenced a whole generation with his idea of obtaining from an object the image of its essential being. The 1960s saw a very different approach to abstraction in the attempt to wed the innovations and methodologies of science and technology to creative work, resulting in the early use of computers to produce works of art. The concept of Generative Photography, developed by the photographer and art historian Gottfried Jäger (b. 1937), arose from this movement, and includes the luminograms of Kilian Breier (b. 1931), for which light rays are directed on to light-sensitive paper, and Pierre Cordier's chemigrams, a process in which substances are made to affect the texture of the photographic emulsion, reducing the role played by light to that of catalyst. Digital technology has further added to the possibilities of abstraction, while other inventions such as magnetic resonance imaging and the scanning electron microscope have permitted an invisible world to be made visible.
Abstract photography, however, is not restricted to the play of light and chemicals in the darkroom or the creation and manipulation of images with computers, but throughout its history has equally found expression through straight photography. Images by Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Albert Renger-Patzsch, and Harry Callahan, among many others, employ unusual framing and viewpoints to dissociate the identity of the objects photographed from the resulting image. These methods have not been supplanted by more technical means of creating images, whether in the darkroom or at the computer, but have recurred throughout the history of abstract and experimental photography and persist today. The repertoire of abstraction has grown such that older techniques may be revived to create new effects: Talbot's contact prints, for example, found new expression in Schad's photograms, and again in the early 21st-century work of Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). Techniques may also be combined for new effects. In place of a history of successive technologies, what has characterized the development of abstract and experimental photography is an increasing sophistication in the theoretical underpinnings that artists cite as the source or meaning of their imagery. Basic definitions and concepts are now routinely challenged, including those of ‘picture’ and ‘photography’, as the image-making process turns further inward to explore its own significance.
— Molly Rogers
Bibliography
- Rotzler, W., Photographie als künstlerisches Experiment: Von Fox Talbot zu Moholy-Nagy (1974).
- Jäger, G. (ed.), The Art of Abstract Photography (2002)
