photogram, as the medium in which those experi-
ments were carried out by the nineteenth century
photographic innovators William Henry Fox Tal-
bot, Hippolyte Bayard, Nice ́phore Nie ́pce, and Sir
John Herschel, is not only present at photography’s
inception but fundamental to it. Nevertheless, it is
important to keep in mind that this aspect of
photograms has been variously foregrounded and
obscured, depending on the diverse cultural con-
texts in which photograms were made and received;
significantly, the term ‘‘photogram’’ itself, while in
wide use now, did not even appear until the 1920s,
and the term ‘‘shadowgram’’ was used interchange-
ably with it as late as the 1940s.
Historical Beginnings
The first pictorial photograms were produced as
byproducts of testing emulsions. While both
Bayard and Talbot had professed a desire to record
images projected by a camera obscura, for the sake
of experimentation it was simpler to place graphi-
cally distinct objects, often leaves and lace, directly
onto sensitized surfaces to measure chemical accu-
racy and permanence. Both men called these
brown-scale images ‘‘photogenic drawings,’’ but it
was Talbot who would give photograms originary
status as ‘‘the pencil of nature,’’ the process by
which ‘‘nature draws herself’’ without human inter-
ference. The attribution would soon be seized by
Talbot’s tremendously popular calotype method—
an ironic development, since it was in the stub-
bornly negative photogram images that Talbot
had first recognized the potential for infinite repro-
duction that would become virtually synonymous
with photographic practice. But Talbot had been
making photogenically drawn images of leaves as
early as 1826, and in spite of the speedy rise of the
camera-based system, photograms remained a valu-
able resource for botanists, as the negative images
were the exact size of the original specimen and
were more precise than the positive prints made
from them.
Anna Atkins is distinctive among these botanists
for the albums she assembled; the initial series,
British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843–53
(1853), are the first published photographic books.
The cyanotype technique, perfected by Herschel in
1839, produced a vivid Prussian blue photogram,
and is the same procedure used to make architec-
tural blueprints today. For Atkins, the idea that her
botanographs were ‘‘sun drawings’’ in which nat-
ural light helped the plant to accurately reproduce
itself on the treated paper was of the greatest impor-
tance. The photogram in this context was under-
stood as a deeply organic kind of drawing, and
while the cyanotype was unable to represent
volumes, surface details, color, or even an ideal
specimen combining features scattered over several
samples into a single paradigm, photogenic drawing
was valued for its materiality—for the sense that,
far from being an illusion, it was the unmediated
trace of the object, and therefore a graphic, archiv-
ally permanent, scientific presentation (as opposed
to representation) of nature itself.Avant-Garde Experiments
Atkins’s process was quickly rendered obsolete even
in amateur scientific circles by the sheer pace of
technological developments within the field. As
visual correlates, photograms were extremely lim-
ited: they could not show natural color or internal
structure. Nor were they well suited to publishing
purposes: they could not include cross-sections or
explanatory text and could not scale the object up or
down. By the end of the century, photograms had
been relegated to the sphere of parlor tricks and
children’s amusements. It was perhaps this margin-
ality, combined with the lingering sense of the
photogram as an origin-point at once primitive,
material, and fundamental, that made it attractive
to European avant-garde artists of the interwar per-
iod looking for alternative modes of representation.
Artists aligned with the Dada, Surrealist, and Bau-
haus movements as well as the Soviet avant-garde
recognized that photograms circumvented the con-
ventions of Cartesian perspective imposed by the
camera’s lens. Because they rejected pictorial tradi-
tions, photograms were an ideal medium for the
critique of those models of perception that gave the
human subject authority over objects in the visual
field. With this revision of contemporary representa-
tion in mind, we can begin to limn the fascination of
the avant-garde with the photogram at a formal-
political level, as a medium aligned more with mon-
tage and collage than with camera photography.
Like their nineteenth century predecessors (of
whom the avant-gardes claimed ignorance) photo-
grams of the interwar period are monochromatic
negative images, but unlike high-contrast photo-
genic drawings, they tend to show a fuller range of
tonal values, delivering a degree of spatial depth
and volume missing from botanographs. Rather
than confining themselves to flat specimens that
delivered a recognizable, naturalistic image, avant-
garde artists experimented with a variety of light
sources and dimensional objects of varying trans-PHOTOGRAM