Alternative Photography (Part 3)

Photograms of flowers

The other day I received a beautiful bouquet of flowers. There were tulips, lilies, gerberas and all kinds of other flowers in it. For the first five days it looked very pretty and I really enjoyed looking at it. But then it slowly started to whither and didn't look that beautiful anymore. If I had guests over, they probably would have wondered why I had this sad-looking bouquet in my living room. But luckily, nobody came to visit! So, when the day came, and the tulips started to lose their petals, I carefully cut off their heads and took them to my little darkroom. You probably guessed it by now, what I had in mind: I wanted to make photograms of them.

the sad looking remnants of my bouquet

So, I took the remnants of my bouquet into my darkroom, where I already had everything set up: the chemicals for developing the photo paper, the photo paper I wanted to use, a red light (because normal light will damage the light-sensitive paper) and a light source to make the photogram with. 

The process is relatively simple: you turn off the light in your darkroom and turn on your safe light. You take your sheet of light-sensitive paper and carefully place the flower on top. Then you expose the photo paper to light for a few seconds. You remove the flower and put the paper in the developer. Where the light has hit the paper everything will turn black in the development. Where it was covered with the flower, it will remain white or turn grey, depending on the object's density. Once your image appears on the paper, you take it out, rinse it with water to stop its development. After that, it goes into another chemical bath -the fixer- to make the image permanent. After a final wash in water, you have your very own photogram.

And here are my top nine:

Photograms of flowers

I just love the surreal look of them. You can see that these are flowers, but they don’t look like your typical photograph. They look more like x-rays of flowers to me. Such a simple process, but unique results nonetheless.

And then - just for fun -, I scanned them and inverted them to see, what they would look like. The results are quite interesting too. Here is a side by side comparison:

Do you like the original or the inverted one more? Please feel free to leave a comment. I would love to hear from you.

In case you missed my last post, where I shared a bit about the history of the photogram, you can read it here.

I hope you enjoyed this weeks newsletter.

And as always: Thank you for being here.

Susanne

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