Photograms-a-go-go

Probably my favourite part of LCC is the darkrooms. Before starting my photography course I'd never used a darkroom, and knew nothing about how they worked. Now I am hooked. I spend all my free time there, between classes, after college, on my free days. My current obsession is making photograms.

For those of you not in the know, normally when you print a photo you put the negative in the enlarger, turn the light on, and it projects the image on to a sheet of photo paper underneath. When you make a photogram however you don't use a negative, you simply take an object, place it directly on to a sheet of photosensitive paper, and the expose it. The area where the object is will remain white (or grey if it is semi-transparent) as no light can pass through, and the area where the light can get will go black, thus creating a negative image. Below are a few random examples of my work.









One of our projects was titled 'Red' and I decided to focus on the idea of the word red, deliberately not using colour in order to make the viewer reconsider their preconceptions of what red is and what it means. So I created a series of type based photograms, using printable acetate transparencies.



I plan to create more type based ones, and have several ideas swimming round my head. Expect more posts on my darkroom experiments soon!