Work:
Talbot experimented with trying to make an image record on paper (the camera lucida) due to his inability to draw realistic pictures on his holiday in Italy. He wanted to create an aid to the painter and set about a device. Talbot was from a very wealthy background he was from the English upper classes and was keen to dabble in inventing (which he could afford to do). His first works c1834 "photogenic drawing" were created by coating papers with light sensitive silver salts and then placing objects (ferns, lace, flowers) onto the surface and exposing this to natural light. He exposed the contacted objects and paper directly in bright sunlight any areas that were not exposed to light were recorded as white silhouettes. Because the image was formed by the reaction of light he named the process Photogenic drawing or as a Sciagraphic process (photo meaning light and genic beautiful, Scia is Greek for shadow and graphic meaning painting, drawing and writing.) He based his first photographic invention on Wedgewoods discoverys. He called his process the Calotype (based on the Greek word form Kalos meaning beautiful). His process was a negative to positive process and therefore was capable of being mass produced. He made his first permanent image in 1837 of Lacock Abbey his inherited home and he went on to produce many other views of his home and also of plant forms. In 1841 after patenting his process he published The Pencil of Nature which was illustrated with 24 of his photographs proving how artistic the medium could be.
In the early nineteenth century artists and photographers began to experiment with making photographs using pure light, the inherent principle of the medium. From 1918 Christian Schad, an artist connected with the Zurich Dada movement, began to reconstruct Talbot's early experiments. Schad used torn paper, ribbon, string and newsprint and he contact printed the objects directly onto photographic paper. He produced his own photocollages which show a debt to the Cubist collages dating from 1912. Schad labelled his process as Schadographs (although he may have been influenced by his Dadaist friend Tristan Tzara.) Schadographs, Schad believed, could later be enhanced by the addition of drawings and paintings. In the 1920s Man Ray (1890-1976), an American abstract painter and Dadaist who settled in Paris, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), a Hungarian abstract painter living in Berlin, simultaneously and independently came upon their own versions of Talbot's photogenic drawings. During the 1920s Tristan Tzara is believed to have shown both men the work of Christian Schad. Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy took Schad's experiments further by placing three dimensional objects directly onto photographic paper and exposing them to light. Man Ray termed his process Rayographs and Moholy-Nagy entitled his work Photograms. Moholy-Nagy's term has continued to be used today and may be more appropriate for the reasons he stated himself in 1937 "I would think that photogram is a better name than "shadowgraph" because-at least in my experiments- I used or tried to use not alone shadows of solid transparent and translucent objects but really light effects themselves e.g. lenses, liquids, crystals and so on." Dawn Ades, Photomontage, p 150.