in Schwitters’s journalMerz(1923), were made in
collaboration with de Stijl artist Vilmos Huszar
and signed ‘‘El Huszar and Vilmos Lissitzky.’’
The photograms, printed in both positive and
negative versions, are distinctive in that the objects
used were mostly transparent, some of them
printed with commercial text. The resulting images
recall the flattened field of Schad’s collage-like
prints, but with a much greater degree of control
(Lissitzky used printing-out paper, which allows
the operator to see the images before they are
fully developed) and with the added peculiarity of
spatial illusions juxtaposed with flattened silhou-
ettes and non-objective type. It is this combination
of the contact-printed photogram with readymade
photographic images and typeface that is dis-
tinctive of Lissitzky’s complex photomontages.
Accordingly, among his contributions to the inter-
national expositionFilm und Fotoof 1929 was a
combination print of an articulated mannequin
juxtaposed with a photographic negative of the
Eiffel Tower. Most memorably, he would use the
technique in combination with photomontage in
richly textured portraits of Kurt Schwitters (1924)
and himself, notablyThe Constructor(1924) and
Self Portrait with Wrapped Head(1924). Lissitzky’s
series of photogram-based advertisements for Peli-
kan ink and carbon paper (1924), with their witty
interchange of light, shadow, and various means of
representation stand in marked contrast to Man
Ray’s literal interpretation of his commercial sub-
ject inElectricite ́.
Although it has received comparatively little
attention from art historians, the photogram tech-
nique circulated alongside photomontage and col-
lage in the interwar period as a privileged mode of
resistance against artistic norms and visual conven-
tions. Man Ray’s work in particular was almost
immediately internationally published; Moholy-
Nagy’s Painting, Photography, Film (1925) was
translated into Russian in 1927; and photograms
by Man Ray, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, and Schwit-
ters (of which only one survives) figured promi-
nently in the highly influential Film und Foto
show held in Stuttgart in 1929 and which traveled
internationally. Within the next decades, a number
of artists would experiment with photograms,
among them Herbert Bayer, Umbo, Oskar Nerlin-
ger, Alexandr Rodchenko, Raoul Hausmann,
Maurice Tabard, Roger Parry, Dora Maar, and
rather surprisingly, the painter Pablo Picasso. The
practice was particularly prominent among the
Czech modernists, notably Miroslav Ha ́k, Jaroslav
Ro ̈ssler, Hugo Ta ́borsky, and Jaromı ́r Funke.
Contemporary Photograms
Although Moholy-Nagy would introduce the pho-
togram process in the United States in the 1930s,
the work of American and European artists exploring
new critical practices in the postwar context are more
aligned with Dada’s indexical records and Lissitzky’s
heterogeneous approaches than Moholy-Nagy’s pure
abstractions. By the late twentieth century, photo-
grams, like photographs, appeared in the pictorial
frame intermixed with a host of other media. The
photogram technique, along with photography itself,
surrendered its claim as a natural process and was
folded into the postmodern acknowledgement that all
images were culturally mediated. Robert Rauschen-
berg and Susan Weil’s body blueprints of the 1950s,
and West Coast artist Bruce Conner’s body-sized
photograms of the 1970s explored the disjunction
between vision and phenomenal experience, while
Robert Heinecken, German painter Sigmar Polke,
and American photographer Thomas Barrow used
photograms in the 1980s to draw readymade scraps of
masscultureintotheframeofartisticpractice.Eventhe
more lyrical abstractions of Adam Fuss and German
photographer and photo-historian Floris Neusu ̈ss
partake of a tension between pattern and reference
that revises avant-garde photograms for a contem-
porary audience comfortable with the breakdown
between art and commercial design. Other contem-
porary photographer-artists who use the technique as
one among many include the Spanish Joan Fontcu-
berta, the Germans Willy Kessels and Andreas Mu ̈l-
ler-Pohle, and the Americans Susan Rankaitis and
James Welling.
Only very recently, with the advent of digital
photography, has the photogram become relevant
once again as an avatar of materiality in an increas-
ingly virtual world. In this newly expanded field of
photographic possibilities, photograms testify to
the physical presence of the objects they represent
in a way that digital photography cannot approach
without risking accusations of fraudulence and
deceit. If contemporary photogram processes no
longer bear the full revolutionary valence of their
avant-garde prototypes, they at least seem to have
regained their status as evidence, however dis-
tanced that evidence is from everyday vision.
Whether their inherent visual paradoxes can now
be deployed as resistant to the status-quo is
another matter.
SusanLaxtonSeealso:Abstraction; Bauhaus; Camera Obscura;
Constructed Reality; Dada; Darkroom; Futurism;PHOTOGRAM