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To the uninitiated, the term “cameraless photography” might be a bit bewildering. How can there be a photograph when a camera, the seemingly most essential tool of the medium, is absent?
A photograph is literally a “light picture” but not all photographs are created with the boxy apparatus that is the camera. But clearly, artist Anne Arden McDonald thinks outside the box. But to paraphrase the Talking Heads’ 1980 hit “Once in a Lifetime,” “Well, how did she get here?”
And how did we get here? Where do we start?
One of the oldest types of cameraless photography was achieved by coating paper or other conductive substrates, such as cotton, wool, and anodized aluminum, for example, with photosensitive chemicals which react to ultra-violet (UV) light to capture images of objects placed on their treated surfaces.
In the 19th century, cameraless photography was primarily a scientific process used to garner some understanding of the natural world rather than considered as an art medium per se. Illustrator and botanist Anna Atkins (1799-1871) created photograms, as they came to be known, using cyanotype paper, which produced Prussian blue images that could be developed in water. In the 1880s, the cyanotype process was utilized to copy engineering and architectural drawings, leading to the creation of the term “blueprint.”
Another kind of “light picture” was discovered in 1895 by physicist Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923) when, while working close to a cathode ray tube, saw the bones in his hand, making him the first to detect X-rays. He later made a contact print of his wife Bertha’s hand, which showed her bones beneath her wedding ring, which she referred to as “a vague premonition of death.”
Artists were soon embracing photograms as a new way of seeing the world. While traditional camera-based photography records the world as it is (sort of), the photograms are produced with the process of negation: images appear from the absence of light in the spaces covered by objects.
The Surrealist and Dadaist artist Man Ray (1890-1976) created photograms, utilizing such disparate objects as feathers, springs, thumbtacks, doilies, combs, rolls of film, ribbons, matchboxes, and an egg beater, that he called “rayographs,” referring to rays of light and, cleverly enough, his own surname.
In “Tracing Light,” McDonald’s dramatic and engaging exhibition at UMass Dartmouth’s CVPA Campus Gallery, she certainly taps into a Man Ray-esque sensibility while happily acknowledging the antecedent, and then throws it all into a Waring blender, effectively reinventing the photogram for a contemporary audience. So, to reiterate: how did she get here?
McDonald was born in London, raised in Atlanta and resides in Brooklyn, where she maintains her studio.
From the ages of 15 to 30, she did a series of untitled (but numbered) black-and-white self-portraits by positioning herself in sparse landscapes and abandoned buildings in Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, California and throughout New England.
Almost all of those images resonate with a voyeuristic sensibility as she comes across as contemplative or wistful or angelic or sensual or enigmatic or playful or even a bit fatalistic.
It was self-portraiture informed by the landscape, interior photography, performance art, sculpture, installation art, ritual, folklore and film noir.
In the past 40 years, she has had over 50 solo exhibitions and participated in roughly 600 group shows in 20 countries. For six years, she taught at the Parsons School of Design in New York City and lectured on staged photography, self-portraiture, Czech and Slovak photography and alternative practices.
The photographic work In “Tracing Light” is done without a camera or negatives. Utilizing photographic paper, light and chemistry, rust, metal shavings, soap bubbles and more, she uses material and technology from both scientific and domestic realms.
“I am inspired by the dialogue painters and sculptors have with their materials, and the way that interaction informs the resulting image,” noted McDonald. By applying glue as a resist and navigating the surface of the paper with alternating chemicals, she pulls forth imagery in the form of “chemical paintings.”
Her “experiments” include elements as varied as household bleach, eggshells, shards of broken glass, live ants, wax, and a self-cultivating mold that feeds on silver gelatin photo paper.
The work in the exhibition explores circles and spheres as atoms or planets, representing the microscopic and macroscopic realities of the physical world.
Gallery Director Viera Levitt has said of McDonald: “Anne is able to create magic out of ephemeral optical situations and chemical reactions.”
All those self-portraits from decades ago were personal and intimate. The orbs speak to the subatomic and the galactic, all of what surrounds us and all of what is within us.
One cannot look at McDonald’s cameraless silver gelatin prints without, on occasion, thinking of abstract expressionism in its heyday, from Lee Krasner’s gestural strokes to the bold and dark ferocity of Willem de Kooning, and from the violent spatter of Jackson Pollock to the heavy quietude of Robert Motherwell. But she is making her images with an earnest deliberateness born of necessity, while wearing a respirator and thick latex gloves and a heavy-duty apron.
Little kids mixing things together in a kitchen and first-year art students throwing everything at a canvas are often “experimenting” but not often successfully. But the steadfast commitment that McDonald brings to her studio largely works because she has likely had enough flubs (probably well-documented) that she has it down to a science, quite literally.
Paying close attention to process and accepting the result and having an eye for what works is key to her success in this series. And the work is stunning.
“Corpusule” is named for a living cell, such as a red or a white blood cell or a cell in cartilage or bone. “Meiosis Mitosis” refers to two distinct types of cell division (for sexual reproduction and for body growth and repair.) “Virus,” an image created before the Covid-19 pandemic, looks like a black-and-white version of the spiky fuzz-ball that was used in every newspaper when it hit.
“Big Bang,” “Moon,” “Molecule,” “Cluster,” and “Emerging” are all self-explanatory.
McDonald is a formidable photographer and self-taught scientist. But she’s more than that.
She’s an alchemist of the arts … one that thinks outside the box.
“Tracing Light / Cameraless Photography by Anne Arden McDonald” is on display at the CVPA Campus Gallery, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 285 Old Westport Road, Dartmouth, until March 31.
Don Wilkinson has been writing art reviews, artist profiles and cultural commentary on the South Coast for over a decade. He has been published in local newspapers and regional art magazines. He is a graduate of the Swain School of Design and the CVPA at UMass Dartmouth. Email him at dwilkinson@newbedfordlight.org
