Glass Photograms

As a young art student I was initially a sculpture major working primarily in the "Hot Arts" as we called it. The hot arts program focused on metal work, bronze casting, and glass blowing. I became immersed in my excitement for working with glass and created hundreds of objects during the two years I practiced this art form.

What intrigues me most about Glass is that the solid object is actually a constant and slow moving liquid even in its solid form. Additionally, the characteristics of hand-blown glass include texture in the form of waves and bubbles that commercially created glass does not have. These textures are beautiful to me. Especially beautiful are the ways these "imperfections" react to light.

Eventually I moved my interests toward photography and design. This seemed to make for sense to me as a career move. A large part of my interest in Photography has to do with manipulating light. Often the light is more a part of my work than the object being photographed. It was this interest in light that caught my eye one day as I was admiring the patterns cast by one of the glass objects I had created years before as the sun shone through the object sitting in a window.

I decided to attempt an experiment in my dark room to see if I could capture the magical quality of the majestic patterns created by the sun passing through the hand-blown glass. The results were quite different but very exiting just the same.

What I did was use color 8 inch by 10 inch photographic paper in a contact frame to hold the paper flat, then placed the glass objects directly on the paper and passed light from my darkroom enlarger directly through the objects. When using this photogram technique the objects literally become the negative. No film or cameras were involved in the making of these images and each one is an original and irreproducible image. I tested various exposure times and enlarger lens aperture settings to get the best results. Here are a few of my experiments.

Here are a few examples of the hand blown glass objects used to create these photograms. The blue bowl in the center was used in the first photogram above. Photogram 3 was created using one of the tan color bowls in the left image. The rondel bowl above on the right was used to create photogram 4 and 6.

I was originally introduced to photogram techniques while studying the incredible work of Man Ray from the 1920's. If you have access to a dark room this is a really fun process with endless possibilities. I also created many of these photograms using black and white darkroom techniques. The black and white images are equally interesting. I began to experiment with objects other than glass too. I plan to share these in another Gather article soon. I hope you enjoy these as much as I do.