Rayographs - Text 1
Rayographs, by Dario Marchiori
Rayograph was the name given by the American artist Man Ray to a photographic technique which he discovered by chance, consisting in placing objects directly onto light sensitive paper and then exposing it briefly to light and fixing the image. There is thus no need for a camera, only a darkroom. Depending on the characteristics of the object placed on the camera (its shape, transparency, thickness, position), the impression made by the light varies. This technique, generally called a “photogram,” is in truth well known in the history of photography ever since the work of the pioneers Thomas Wedgwood in the first decade of the 1800s and W. Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins in the 1840s. The avant-gardes of the 1910s and 20s, and in particular Dada, rediscovered this technique with Christian Schad (beginning in 1918), Lászlo Moloy-Nagy (1921) and Man Ray (1922). Other techniques can be seen as similar to the rayogram, for example radiography, which uses the human body as the object through which pass light rays (X-rays in this case).
In his rayographs (also known as rayogrammes in French), Man Ray paid particular attention to the volume of the objects (he was working during the same years on films in relief with Marcel Duchamp), the heterogeneity of the composition (collage was in great fashion at the time) and the use of hybrid techniques (by using the rayograph in tandem with superimposition for example). Often he used everyday objects which were nonetheless transformed by the rayograph, a technique often seen as a transition from Dada to Surrealism. Man Ray was fascinated with the automatism of the process, which made possible a more direct gesture freed from both the artist’s subjectivity and the technical constraints of the industrial tool (the camera). In addition, a rayograph has no negative from which one or more positive prints would be made, making it a unique original like a painting.
Man Ray transposed rayography to cinema following the advice of Tristan Tzara, the leader of Dada, who commissioned a film from him for the Soirée du coeur à barbe event on 6 July 1923. Informed of this (by his own account) the day before the event, Man Ray made Le retour à la raison with previously shot images and others made for the occasion, including rayographs on a film strip. He pinned strips of 35 mm film stock of about one metre in length to his work table and placed objects on them: pins, tacks, salt and pepper, a metal spiral. Of the fourteen sections of rayographs in the film, four were duplicate negatives, demonstrating another chromatic possibility for the rayograph by inverting the black and the white: whereas rayographs usually consist in shapes in a relatively light shade on a black background, here dark shapes stand out against a white background, which becomes even brighter when projected on screen.
Numerous experimental filmmakers have worked with rayographs, from Len Lye (Color Cry, 1953) to Jeanne Liotta (Loretta, 2003) and Olivier Fouchard (9.5 >16, 2005). With Mothlight (1963), Stan Brakhage created the “natural” counterpart to the inanimate objects preferred by the Dada artists by placing organic elements between two pieces of transparent 16mm film: moth wings, pieces of grass and flower petals. A print of the film was then made with a contact printer. More recently, Peter Tcherkassky was inspired by the rayograph to make his “CinemaScope trilogy.” Working in the found footage tradition, Tcherkassky re-filmed and superimposed images taken from other films, foregrounding the material characteristics of the film stock object and selecting parts of the image using an electronic “brush” (a laser pointer). In this way he recovered and reinvented the painter’s gesture that Man Ray had left behind with his rayographs.
