parency, intent on pursuing the least recognizable,
most unnatural images that the process could yield.
Successive exposures, layering with flat glass,
manipulating the paper, moving and combining
light sources and refraction effects greatly increased
the possibility of an unforeseeable outcome, a goal
that was very different from that of the early photo-
gram operators. Rather than making the photo-
gram transparent to vision, a vehicle for the
presentation of a reality reassuringly commensurate
with the perceived world, these artists drew atten-
tion to those aspects of the photogram that made
reality strange. Over the existing rhetoric of the
photogram as origin, the avant-gardes layered a
second discourse, of the photogram as absolutely
incommensurate with normative vision.
The first photograms specifically intended to
revise art practice are, ironically, the least well
known. Working in the anti-bourgeois, anti-aca-
demic milieu of Zurich Dada, Christian Schad pro-
duced approximately 25 photograms in a single
year, 1919. The images are at once extremely casual
and clearly manipulated: while the detritus scat-
tered across their surfaces is strikingly acomposi-
tional, many of the pictures have been cut into
irregular shapes after developing and rearranged
as haphazard collages. Of all the photograms of
the interwar period they most clearly convey the
aleatory aesthetic that characterized Dada and
early Surrealism. But in their stubborn non-refer-
entiality, they also speak of the photogram as a
form of ‘‘anti-photography,’’ working against
photography’s claim to enhanced vision. Schado-
graphs, as they came to be called, initiated a form
of photography without a ‘‘point of view’’—both
literally and figuratively, in the sense that the view-
finder as well as the ideal single viewer it implied
were missing; it was an absurdist’s medium.
Schad published only one photogram, in the
Paris journal Dadaphone (1920), just before he
broke with the Dada movement. He would return
to the medium long after, in 1960, but in a much less
abstract form, inspired by the Romantic prose
poetry of Aloysius Bertrand. Meanwhile, without
Schad’s knowledge, his photograms would be
named and shown by the Dada impresario Tristan
Tzara, who saw that they were placed alongside
Man Ray’s and La ́szlo ́Moholy-Nagy’s photograms
in the 1936 showDada, Surrealism and Fantastic
Artat the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
It was Tzara who showed Schad’s work to the
expatriate American Man Ray in 1922, and who
subsequently gave Man Ray’s photograms the
name ‘‘Rayographs.’’ Working first as a Dada
and then from within the French Surrealist move-
ment, Man Ray produced hundreds of photograms
(and in 1923 one photogram film, Return to Rea-
son) that range from the straightforwardly repre-
sentational (flowers, articulated mannequins) to
the utterly unreadable. Many of the images com-
bine these two poles into a formal tension that
summarizes the paradox of the photogram as
both a material trace and an abstract representa-
tion of reality. Unlike the tiny Schadographs,
which had been printed in sunlight and have the
flat scrappy look of a Schwitters collage, Rayo-
graphs open onto a lush, nuanced space created in
the darkroom with a variety of lights exposing
three-dimensional objects. The reference is much
more to the plasticity of Dada and Surrealist
assemblage than to collage properly speaking,
with many of the images combining startlingly fig-
urative planes that dwindle into a deep visual void.
Possibly Man Ray’s airbrush painting technique,
explored in the years just before he moved to Paris,
prepared him for the use of dimensional objects
and the mechanically assisted deskilling necessary
to, in his words, ‘‘paint with light,’’ but his experi-
ments undoubtedly drew on his friend Marcel
Duchamp’s exploration of non-retinal art. By giv-
ing up the camera (the photographic correlate to
the retina), Man Ray arguably opened the photo-
gram onto a critique of vision commensurate with
Duchamp’s—as if to corroborate this, the first
Rayograph to be published, in theLittle Review
(1922), bore the name of Duchamp’s alter-ego,
Rrose Selavy, in mirror writing. But ultimately,
the attraction that photograms held for those Eur-
opean Dadaists who would eventually become sur-
realists also lay in their apparently immediate and
‘‘automatic’’ quality. That aspect that Talbot had
called ‘‘nature drawing herself’’ would be identified
with the psychic and technological automatisms
that fascinated these two movements and seemed
to guarantee for them an unforeseeable result, as
against composition and authorial intent.
From the start, the Rayographs were actively
promoted as central to Paris Dada and later,
French Surrealism, appearing regularly in the pub-
lications of both of those movements. The first
gallery show of the images was accompanied by a
catalogue entitled Champs Delicieux (1922) to
evoke the first automatic text, Andre ́Breton and
Phillippe Soupault’s Les Champs Magnetiques
(1919). In the catalogue’s introductory essay, Tri-
stan Tzara calls the Rayographs ‘‘photography,
inside-out.’’ His attention to the inversions and
negations effected by the technique—its value
reversals, its excoriation of painting, its mirroring of
unrecognizable images—is coupled to an emphasisPHOTOGRAM