I am grateful for man-made light and the creative freedom it gives . . . With syn-
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| MILI: Pas de Ballet |
chroflash and speedlamps I can illuminate what I want and no more. At will I can create zones of importance by dominant and subordinate lighting. I can impart sculptural volume or flat rendering to the same object. By controlling direction and intensity I can launch light as a dynamic partner of dance action, propelling, restraining. and qualifying. Light is the shape and play of my thought . . . my reason for being a photographer.
Too often dance photographs are nothing more than technical accomplishments, in which action is stopped, anti the perlormers ate left awkwardly in space. In Barbara Morgan’s photographs every shape has meaning. Sometimes ''freezing” of act ion is demanded: at other times a slightly blurred image helps to convey the emotion. Often both renderings are needed simultaneously, to show part of the action at tested and part in flow. Experience has enabled her to visualize what the lens will record during the fraction of a second it is open. She sees the dance not as a spectator, nor as a performer, but as a photographer. She has brought her sense of light and form to many other fields besides the dance, always bringing out the human qualities with warmth and acute sympathy.
When action is to be “frozen,” so that each lock of hair and every thread of swirling costume is to be rendered with breathless sharpness, the so-called stroboscopic lamp or speedlamp is used, which gives brilliant light for as short a time as 1/10,000 or even 1/100,000 second.
In 1931 Harold Edgerton of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed an electronic lamp: current built up in a condenser to a high voltage was allowed to discharge in a gas-filled tube. The resulting flash was of great intensity, yet of extremely brief duration, and it could be repeated at will. He built it to examine rapidly moving machine parts, by the long familiar stroboscopic method. If a light flashes at exactly the rate that a regularly moving object revolves or oscillates, it will illuminate the same phase of the motion at each flash, and the object will appear to stand still.
Edgerton’s light was so brilliant that photographs could be taken with it, and it was of such brief duration that the splash of a drop of milk, a bullet in flight, the beating of a hummingbird’s wing could be recorded on film with a single flash. This use of the new light had many applications. Even with subjects comparatively motionless, more detail was secured because imperceptible movements of the camera and subject were eliminated. The flash was so brilliant that color film, which is of low light sensitivity, could be exposed instantaneously.
Recently portable stroboscopic units have been perfected which can be slung over the shoulder. News photographers are replacing their flashbulbs with these powerful lights because they can be used over and over again.
When repeated flashes are made in true stroboscopic fashion with the Edgerton lamp while the lens of the camera is open, a series of images is recorded on the film. This refinement of Marey’s chronophotography spreads out in space phases of action normally invisible. Thus the rush of a tennis player’s body, arm and racket is recorded in consecutive images which enable us to analyze each part of the stroke. Gjon Mili has used this multi-exposure technique to picture, in an imaginative way, the flow of motion — the cycle of drumsticks, a pas de ballet. The camera has gone beyond seeing and has brought us a world of form normally not seen.
12 EXPERIMENTS IN ABSTRACTION
In 1913 Alvin Langdon Coburn, a Photo-Secessionist who had first exhibited in 1900. included in his one-man show at the Goupil Gallery. London, a series of live photographs under the title “New York from its Pinnacles. I hey were all views looking down, and the distorted perspective emphasized the abstract pattern of streets and squares and buildings. In the catalog he pointed out that one of them was
almost as fantastic in its perspective as a Cubist fantasy; but why should not the camera artist break away from the worn-out conventions, that even in its compara-tively short existence have begun to cramp and restrict his medium, and claim the freedom of expression which any art must have to be alive?
Four years later Coburn produced completely non-objective photographs. These Vortographs were deliberate abstractions:
There was at that time a notion that the camera could not be “abstract,’’ and I was out to disprove this. The Vortographs were made with three mirrors clamped together in a triangle, into which the lens of the camera was projected, and through which various objects (bits of crystal and wood on a table with a glass top) were photographed. I greatly enjoyed making the Vortographs, for the patterns amazed and fascinated me!
Christian Schad, a member of the Zurich Dada group of modern artists, in 1918 produced abstractions photographically without a camera. He laid cutout paper and flat objects on light-sensitive paper which, upon exposure to light, recorded designs that closely resemble those cubist collages made of pieces of newspaper and bric-a-brac stuck onto canvas.
Around 1921 Man Ray (an American painter in Paris) and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (a Hungarian painter in Berlin) began to make, quite independently, their somewhat similar rayograpits and photograms. They placed three-dimensional objects on the light-sensitive paper; thus not only were contours recorded and. in the case of translucent objects, texture as well, but also cast shadows. The photogram technique has been enriched by modulating the light which is allowed to fall on the object-strewn paper. A moving beam of
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| coburn: The Octopus, New York, 1913 |
| SCHAD: Schadograph, 1918. TheMuseum of Modern Art |  |
light may be used, or the projected image of textured objects. Sometimes the paper is first covered with glass on which an abstract design has been painted, or to which texture has been applied.
Technically, the photogram is a revival of Talbot’s photogenic drawing. Esthetically, however, it is entirely different. Talbot sought to exploit the representational characteristics of the medium. He related in 1839:
Upon one occasion, having made an image of a piece of lace of an elaborate pattern. I showed it to some persons at the distance of a few feet, with the inquiry, whether it was a good representation? when the reply was, “That they were not so easily to be deceived, for that it was evidently no picture, but the piece of lace itself.”
Moholy-Nagy, on the other hand, found that the photogram
opens up perspectives of a hitherto wholly unknown morphosis governed by optical
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| ray: Rayograph, 1923. The Museum of Modern Art |
moholy-nagy: Photogram, 1923
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| ray: Solarization, 1929. The Museum of Modern Art |
laws peculiar to itself. It is the most completely dematerialized medium which the new vision commands.
The photogram is visually so closely related to abstract painting that it may be considered a branch of that artistic discipline. It was devised by painters; the most significant results have been achieved by them; Moholy-Nagy discovered the technique through painting, and a more recent photogram maker, Gyorgy Kepes, speaks of his products as “photo-drawings.” It is a synthetic rather than an analytic process, a tributary of the main stream of photography in which the camera has been the indispensable instrument, second in importance only to the photographer’s eye.