ENCYCLOPEDIA

Abstraction

Discussions of abstraction in photography may appear to be a paradox, given that the medium is commonly associated with mechanical reproduction and descriptive representation. However, the fact that a photograph is challenging to recognise or barely legible does not negate its technical definition – a luminous print on a photosensitive surface. Regardless of its nature, the photographic image is always an image or representation of something, even if the photographer employs various processes to disguise the image’s representation. Since its discovery, photography has been employed in a multitude of documentary contexts, with images created in accordance with the representational codes of human vision (verism). However, from the early twentieth century onwards, a number of photographers have sought to move beyond this use by experimenting with and developing an abstract practice of photography.

The history of photography frequently coincides with that of Modernism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both in terms of chronology and intellectual development. The evolution of the photograph was particularly shaped by the concept of its specificity and growing autonomy as a medium, encompassing its internal logic, principles, and evolution.

The earliest abstract paintings emerged around 1910, created by Vasily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich and others. At the same time, historians observed the emergence of similar preoccupations among photographers. As early as the advent of photography in the 1830s with the “photogenic drawings” of William Henry Fox Talbot, and continuing through the 1880s with the studies of motion by Thomas Eakins and Etienne-Jules Marey (who termed this “chrono-photography”), one finds images that could be described as abstract, although they serve scientific and technical purposes over aesthetic goals. It was not until 1908 that the formalist, stylised processes indicative of modernity emerged in Great Britain with Malcolm Arbuthnot’s “The Doorstep” or “The Wheel”. These works revealed his interest in Japanese art, with emphases on composition, structure, asymmetry, line, distribution of light and shade. Subsequently, the advent of deliberately abstract photography can be observed in the mid-1910s in America with Paul Strand’s “Porch Shadows” or “The Bowls” in 1915. In these images, Strand employed a variety of techniques, including the manipulation of forms and masses, composition, and the use of a close frame. Three years prior, Alvin Langdon Coburn had already created a comparable work in his series “New York From Its Pinnacles”, with the piece “The Octopus”, which employed a bird’s-eye view and flattened perspective to generate a two-dimensional pattern. It was not until Strand met Ezra Pound and was inspired by the complexities of industrialisation and urbanity that he began to create his well-known series of Vortographs between 1916 and 1917. These works revealed his interest in the cubist diffraction of space and Italian futurism obsession with dynamism and movement.
The tendency towards abstraction in the work of the aforementioned photographers exemplifies the duality that persisted throughout the twentieth century in the work of American and European modernist photographers.
These views included, on the one hand, the inheritance of the ‘pure’ or ‘straight’ photographic aesthetic, which was launched by American photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Aaron Siskind, and others; and on the other hand, an experimental aesthetic, which was directly derived from the European avant-gardism of Moholy-Nagy, Alexander Rodchenko, and others.
The ‘straight’ photography sought to seize an objective reality made of everyday objects that usually escape the human eye. Without any manipulation and by emphasising purely photographic processes such as framing, lighting, focus, scale, or viewpoint, the resulting images exploited the pure formalism of flattened and two-dimensional patterns, geometry, and design. This trend was exemplified in the United States by the work of Bernard Shea Horne, Max Weber and their students at the Clarence H. White School of Photography in the 1910s, in Charles Sheeler’s “House of Doylestown Staircase” (1917), and in the work of Stieglitz, Siskind and others in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1917, the series “Equivalents” was created by Stieglitz, which was followed by Siskind’s work in the 1930s and 1940s. A related strain of the Americanists’ Straight Photography materialised with the New Vision (Neue Sehen) in Germany and Russia. Prominent representatives of this strain included Moholy-Nagy – “From the Radio Tower Berlin” (1928) and Rodschenko – “On The Pavement” (1928).
The aforementioned Straight photographers’ work was further developed by another strain of abstraction that considered photography as an ideal means of plastic expression to build and create new visual codes.
European photographers employed a variety of techniques, including the photogram, manipulation of light, movement and chemistry, to create a body of work that became associated with modernist abstraction. The photogram, which was produced without the use of a camera, allowed artists to create images from shadows and silhouettes of objects placed between the light source and light-sensitive paper or film. This approach involved bypassing the mechanical or technical apparatus in favour of imagination and even surrealism.
The photogram was one of the most enduring techniques of the century, with numerous abstract manipulations originating from it. It was employed by Christian Schad as early as 1918, Man Ray in 1921, and Moholy-Nagy in 1922. Photograms exemplify the preoccupations of Dadaism and Constructivism, allowing the exploration of photography’s profound nature through the exploitation of texture, pattern, transparency, and the duality of positive-negative relationships. The process permits a multitude of possibilities, including experimentation with dematerialisation, the interpenetration of forms, distortion, and lack of perspective. In the 1930s, artists such as Theodore Roszak, Georg Zimin, Piet Zwart, and Willy Zielke employed photograms. Bronislaw Schlabs, Julien Coulommier, Andrzej Pawlowski, Beksinki, and Kurt Wendlandt did so in the 1940s and 1950s. In the 1950s, Lina Kolarova, René Machler, and Andreas Mulas employed the process. In the 1970s, Tomy Ceballos, Kare Magnole, Andreas Muller-Pohle, and Floris M. Neususs utilised the process.
Equally important among abstract practices, the use of light remains a fundamental principle, with the function not only of revealing and making visible, but also of being exploited as a real material. In this respect, we can trace several trajectories, including the images of illuminated surfaces or volumes in Francis Bruguière’s “Light Abstractions” (1919) and Jaromir Funke’s “Light Abstraction, Rectangles” in the 1920s. Between the 1930s and 1950s, photographers such as Moholy-Nagy with his light modulator ”machines”, or Barbara Morgan, used the flow of light, whether stationary or in motion, to produce calligraphic expressions. More recently in France, Thomas Reaume in the 1980s and Bernard Lanteri in the 1990s have realised luminous and fluid forms that defy the fixed nature of the photographic image.
Another aspect of abstraction in photography is movement and blurriness. This tendency is illustrated by the works of Italian Futurists such as the photodynamism of the brothers Arturo and Antonin Bragaglia and the aerial photography of Fedele Azari and Filippo Masoero, as well as the kineticism of German photographers Oskar Schlemmer, Peter Keetman and Otto Steinert in the 1940s and 1950s. In general, these works fit into an aesthetic of speed and movement linked to the expressions of the artistic avant-garde of the time. It was not until the 1950s, however, that an aesthetic of blurriness, movement and randomness peculiar to photography found expression. Thus, the work of the American William Klein seemed to be both a beginning and an important reference point for contemporary photographers such as Gerard Dalla-Santa, Frederic Gallier, Hervé Rabot, Patrick Toth and Muller-Pohle, who in the 1980s saw movement not only as a transcription of the brutal dynamism of the urban world, but also as a mine of pure form, revealing the visual and tactile qualities of photography (for example, grain).
Finally, another group of photographers chose to abandon the optical aspect of the medium in favour of exploring its physical chemistry. Relying on darkroom experimentation and camera-less imagery, photographers explored the abstract qualities possible in chemical experimentation, leading to the specific forms of Edmund Kesting and Chargesheimer in the 1940s and Stryj Piasecki or Pierre Cordier in the 1950s.
Sigmar Polke in the 1970s and Riwan Tromeur in the 1980s created a peculiar formal vocabulary by altering the photographic chemical process itself.

Susana Paiva