Page 89 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 89/146
Christian Schad: Photograms (Schadograms)
This convergence in DADAism of photomontage, photograms, drawing and collage in the period 1918-1919, marks a media fusion that artists like Schad took advantage of. Schad explored the century-old photogram (used by Wedgwood in 1902 and by Fox Talbot in the 1830s) - a few years before Man Ray, Moholy Nagy, El Lissitzky and other modernists began to use this in the 1920s.
You can see why Schad found this a useful photographic technique - it was camera-less, you could arrange your components by hand, cutting and placing your content on a prepared light- sensitive paper, then expose it to light, then fix the exposed paper. It was easy, and allowed much of the freedom and personalisation of photomontage - and made a one-off, unique print, ready for display. It was a medium almost as quick as a photomontage. Of course it had limitations - it wasn’t a reflective medium - the image was created according to the translucency of the content materials - so opaque material gave a white shape, while materials like fabrics (used above) give graded tints, and it was monochrome. And remember, the photogram had to be composed in the dark or in a red-light darkroom.
The ‘Schadograph’ - produced in 1918, is clearly produced in the same Dadaist spirit that charac- terises this period. Schad is creating a work that seems to fit with the emerging photomontage experiments. The roots of photomontage are obscured in various claims of precedent. The claimants include the then Dadaists George Grosz, John Heartfield, Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann, the Russians Gustav Klucis (or Klutsis) and Alexander Rodchenko - and others. Add to this the fact that it wasn’t actually called ‘photomontage’ until 1931 - more than a decade after it was invented as an art-form - and its best here to record them by the earliest images made by these artists that I can locate.
I’m trying here to draw together those facets of expanded photography that were emerging trans- formed after the decisive trigger of Cubism in the period 1908-1912. Let’s include Photomontage, Christian Schad’s photograms (or Schadographs as he termed them), and the nudges toward Ab- stract photography that we see at this time.
The real master of collage - the roots of photomontage - was Kurt Schwitters - criticised as being too interested in formal (abstract) composition to be a proper Dadaist (!) In Schwitters life-long attraction and dedication to the kind of collage he called Merz, he not only created elegant and formally balanced collage pieces (‘beautiful’ in my opinion), but expanded or extended the col- lage form into three-dimensional room-like environments he called Merzbau (the first Merzbau 1923-1933).