the pencil of nature

The story of art, by one account, is that of the influence of one artist upon another. The seed of the plant that flowers in one generation is passed on, dormant and unseen, until it regenerates in evolved form, though perhaps not for many years.

The father of the photogram was the father of photography itself, William Henry Fox Talbot. Talbot created the prototype light-formed image by placing small objects- flowers, ferns, scraps of lace- on sheets of paper coated with silver salts, allowing the sun to delineate the shadows of the objects without the intervention of camera or lens, and giving the sun freedom to determine hue by duration of exposure alone. In his wake, Anna Atkins, the first woman of photography, employed the method to create cyanotypes, coating her paper with a solution of salts of iron to render white outlines against uniform, startling blue.

The photogram fell out of use until reinvented in the 1920s by Man Ray, his Rayographs- urban Jazz Age images, images for their own time, outlines obsessed with recreating common industrial objects as surreal fetishes, worlds away from the still-pastoral surroundings in which Talbot did his science.

An equal number of decades passed before the new efflorescence of the photogram in the hands of Needham, her images reawakening the spirit of Talbot, but with the technical advantages of our own time. Scale is one of them. Where Talbot enregistered tiny, fragile, fragments of lace, Needham has created great images of entire lacy garments, austere white on black, some of which seem to be haunted by the very ghosts of Talbot's own wife and daughters. And even the sun burns with new varieties of colour, inspissating Needham's work with endless varieties of previously unimagined colours. Needham's sure touch brings the photogram to a new and brilliant flowering.

© Noel Chanan, 2005