Floris Neususs: Interview

For me making a photogram is almost the opposite of making photographs. A photogram is like a painting: you have a blank sheet of paper and you create a picture on it, step by step. A camera provides you with an instant image that resembles what you can see in front of you anyway.

What is the most important thing for you about a camera-less photograph?

That you can use it to invent images that represent something that has not been seen before.

Was there anything or anyone in particular that first encouraged you to think so laterally about the rules of photography?

Firstly, I wouldn’t call a photogram a lateral approach to photography. The only thing the two have in common is the use of light sensitive materials and the prefix ‘photo.’ Photography records an image projected through a lens: all that is captured is reflected light. A photogram is a kind of drawing with light, in which, as Moholy-Nagy put it, the light can play as central a role as the pigments do in a painting.

I was aware of the work of Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray in my youth. I’m sure it was this that encouraged me to become a photogram artist myself.

How important is scale and size to your photograms?

The size of photograms is one of the sources of their particular power: they always portray their subjects to scale, unlike photography, in which the size of the image is arbitrary, and most usually depends on the size of the print, rather than the object that has been photographed.

In 1960 I captured the image of a female nude as a photogram, on a two metre length of paper. I discovered that in one sense the fact that the woman in the photogram is life sized communicates intimacy, but in another sense it creates detachment: the picture has no surface detail, so you can’t identify distinctive features. The figure appears to be floating in space. It eludes realistic capture. You could say that a photogram removes and idealises its subject at the same time. With Talbot’s window, for example, we found that reproducing it at actual contributed to the magical effect of its photogram. We decided to emphasise this by including the space below the window, all the way down to the floor.

What is the resonance of Fox Talbot’s window for you?

That 1978 photogram was the start of our adventures in creating photograms of large objects in the places where we found them. It prompted Renate and me to leave the studio work on location. Until then they were always created in a dark room: you arranged your subjects on the paper and then flashed a light to expose the paper. This time we took our equipment to Lacock Abbey and made a photogram of a fixed subject.

This particular subject was for us, not just a window in a building but an iconic window, a window on photography, opened by Talbot. The window is doubly important, because to be able to invent the photograph, Talbot first used photograms to test the light sensitivity of chemicals.

His discovery became a window on the world. I wonder what percentage of our understanding of the planet we live on now comes from photographs?

Your image ensures that we only see the window itself and do not see through it. Was this your intention? If so, why?

Photograms never allow you to see through them. The 'space' in them comes from the viewer’s imagination. Moholy-Nagy’s photograms, for example, give the suggestion of stretching into infinite space. In photography the gaze is guided through perspective into organised planes, in a landscape it is contained by the horizon. This is familiar and comfortable to the eye. Perspective and horizon are absent from photograms, so the space is theoretically unending.

In place of visible objects (like the bush outside the 1978 window, which has since disappeared), our new window photogram uses blue: the colour of the distance. The window is expressed through its structure and shape (including bubbles, smudges, cracks in the glass and a tiny spider). This clear resolution of detail is an essential characteristic of the photogram. It was recognised as early as the 19th century by natural scientists - Anna Atkins, for example - as being superior to that of lens photography in this respect.

How important is chance to your images? Is it something you have had to become comfortable with?

For many artists, chance is an associate. Sometimes I invite it to join me, at other times I exclude it. In the ‘Night Pictures,’ for example, it is a key player, but in the female nudes it hardly features at all.

To what extent do you think the digital age has affected the resurgence of interest in the camera-less photograph?

Digitalisation has helped make photography even more banal. The ubiquity of photographs and their generic appearance has probably helped revive interest in camera-less photography. One attraction of photograms is the continual freshness of the aesthetics they can create, another is the colourful effects they can feature today – for a long time, photograms could only be black and white.

I think photography no longer offers any resistance: it’s like a concrete that you can pour into any mould, but the resulting architecture is too often undefined, sloppy, a bit embarrassing. You can do anything with Photoshop, and everybody does, with the effect that the observer’s imagination is not engaged. A poetic, disquieting mental image evoked through words, like ‘the encounter of a typewriter and an umbrella on a dissecting table,’ loses its mystery when you hold it as a colour photograph in your hand.

A photogram produces a feeling of mental unease by subverting familiar visual patterns like perspective and turning the visual space on its head. Photography works as a comfort, as Man Ray said, because it reproduces what is known. The photogram denies the observer this immediate familiarity and perhaps for that reason, it’s difficult for it to find popular success. The photogram also fails to pander to one of the major contemporary concerns, the representation of the superficial details of a subject, what Moholy-Nagy ironically called ‘surface embellishment.’

Were there any particular circumstances in terms of history or art history that prompted Man Ray and Moholy Nagy to explore the camera-less photograph?

The painter Christian Schad was the first modern artist to work with the photogram, as early as 1919. For him, in Zurich, as for the painter Man Ray in Paris in 1922, the inspiration was the dadaist movement, which was breaking away from traditional painting techniques in favour of various processes where images were automatically generated. When the constructivist painter Moholy-Nagy also made the discovery, in 1922, that it was possible to paint with light instead of with pigments, it was an artistic revelation for him which was to lead to his most important group of works.

How important is the contact the object makes with the paper?

It is as if the photogram has absorbed the contact with the subject being depicted and then offers it to the observer for a visual palpation.

What can photograms tell us about the world that we can’t see with our usual ‘visual alphabet’?

Photograms don’t show us what’s beyond the visible, but they give us a hint of it. In 1922, Tristan Tzara (also allowing himself to be deceived by the prefix ‘photo’) called the photogram ‘la photographie a l’envers,’ reverse photography. It is true that the subject resting on the photo-sensitive paper presents its reverse side to be recorded, the side that is in shadow, the shadow cast by the object itself. This intimate physical connection inscribes into the paper, and this, if you are open to it, is the real fascination of photograms: the tension between the hidden and the revealed.

For example, is it true that the lens of a camera creates an image that is closer to how the human eye sees?

No human can see the way a photogram 'sees'. This is why I think you cannot compare a photograph with a photogram. Certainly the image a camera produces is much closer to how the human eye sees, perhaps too close even. That's why photographs are often taken for true, when they are authentic at best.

Does the way a camera-less photograph appears to the human eye provoke ideas about dreams and the subconscious?

Not automatically. The fact that subjects in a photogram seem to float could be used by the artist to awaken those kinds of feelings. Christian Schad perfected that in his late photograms, from 1960 onwards, in which he created visual interpretations of the eerie poem sequence ‘Gaspard of the Night,’ by Aloysius Bertrand.

What can this way of capturing the world tell us about it?

The surrealists gave us many examples of that, in image and in word.

In his catalogue essay, curator Martin Barnes talks about ‘a poetic dialogue between presence and absence’ being important to your work. Is this something you are consciously trying to express, or is it common to all camera-less photography?

In principle, yes. When you make a photogram from a solid object there are nearly always points of contact, and an impression of physical closeness can often be transmitted through these, especially with the female nudes of course. The poetic unease comes from the tension between the fact that the figure is so near that you feel it is touching you, and the fact that it is so highly abstracted that it seems unattainably distant.

How do you decide what to make your photograms of?

Life, relationships, reading, practical work, chance and accidents all suggest themes. Every work series has been triggered by something different. The last series, which we’re still working on now, came about because the Director of the Glypothek (museum of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture) in Munich asked me if I wanted to photograph the sculptures there. I said no, but I would like to make photograms of them. That aroused his curiosity and he allowed us access to the museum by night. We worked there for nearly four years. That was the beginning of our long and on-going preoccupation with the phenomenon of the museum. Before museums there were houses of curiosities “Wunderkammern”, in which natural history specimens and artefacts from all corners of the earth were displayed alongside each other. Today museums specialise in natural history, anthropology, science and technology, etc. The house of curiosities “Wunderkammer” is the inspiration behind our current project. We make photograms of exhibits in different museums and find new contexts for the images we create. So we might put a photogram of a kouros (an ancient Greek statue of a young man) opposite one of a big fish: artistically stylised beauty set against natural beauty. Or we put a photogram of a sphinx with a curled tail that looks like an infinity sign with photograms suggesting space and time: mathematical models, a coral, an atomic structure model, a sculpture of a woman falling, a Naum Gabo sculpture, an armillary sphere and a cockatoo with its crest standing on end.

Another theme that we’ve been pursuing for a long time came from our frustration that whichever photographic paper we used, forms only appeared as either negative or positive. We worked for years to bring out both negative and positive forms in an image at once. The photogram of the sculpture ‘Hebe’ in the exhibition is an example of this. But the work is getting harder and harder to do: what we’re experiencing now with the disappearance of photographic materials can only be likened to a painter continually having his paints taken away and being presented with a computer screen instead of a canvas.

Other practitioners in the exhibition have captured fleeting things like ripples on water, butterflies etc. You have gone for solid objects. Can you tell me why?

For me the fixing of movement is a photographic problem which I’m not trying to solve in a photogram. In a photogram any movement of the object is frozen by the flash of light. The movement, for me, is provided by the observer’s mind, as in the installation ‘back soon’ or the photogram of the sculpture ‘Hebe’ by Antonio Canova. We’ve also made a transparent version of the Talbot window photogram which is supposed to incorporate movement in a different way. This window will not hang on a wall but stand in free space. Depending on the room, presumably usually a room in a museum or gallery, the image you see through the “displaced” window will be animated by your position as observer and by the environment you are in, including the other visitors.

How important is it for people to understand how you made the image?

It is not important that people know how we made a photogram but someone who knows may have an additional kick.

Can you tell me about your experience of the days at Lacock this year?

We learn something new with every operation we try. Making large scale images like Talbot’s window naturally taught us a lot about handling those massive sheets of paper in the dark. We lit the three sections of the picture one after the other. Once the paper was positioned correctly behind the window inside in the house, I would operate the light, 16 metres away out in the park. It took quite a long time, so it would get cold outside and I’d have to keep moving. We communicated by walkie talkie to co-ordinate what we were doing. We learned that in fact the photographic paper wasn’t affected by the long time it took us to get the positioning right. Nor was it affected by the cars that would sometimes whizz past in the distance with their headlights shining, though we shrieked with terror every time it happened.

We also had a special experience of artistic solidarity with Richard Learoyd, who we didn’t know personally before then. Martin Barnes had found out that Richard owned the only accessible developing machine for our Ilfochrome Classic photo paper in the whole of England. Before we exposed the big photogram we had to do test versions to get the exposure time right. Those tests had to be developed, and the big photogram had to be developed using the same machine to get the expected results. I don’t know if we could have justified all the investment we put into the Lacock project if Richard, at Martin’s request, hadn’t offered us the use of his machine and his time to develop the images. Without him we might have been throwing all our ideas into a void: the whole thing could have come to nothing at all.

The translation of this interview was generously provided by the London Goethe Institute.

See a slideshow of works by Floris Neususs alongside images of him at work on the Lacock commission.

Make your own camera-less photograph:

You can fairly cheaply buy 'nature print paper' and all you need to do is place objects such as leaves, scissors, feathers, flowers and so on, onto the paper, leave in the light (takes one minute in bright sunlight, up to 40 mins if it's overcast). You then rinse the paper under water for a few seconds and the image appears. This is the process that Floris Neussus is using in his film on the V&A Channel.