Camera-Less Photography Returns to the Foreground as Artists Revisit Light, Chemistry, and Control
Before photography became synonymous with lenses and capture, it was also a field of experiments in chemistry, permanence, and the behavior of light. That older lineage is drawing fresh attention now, as artists and institutions revisit camera-less processes that turn objects, paper, and exposure into images without a camera in sight.
Natasha Egan, director of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, said artists working in these modes are often interested in what the medium reveals when the camera is removed. “By removing or altering the camera, they engage photography at its most elemental—light, time, surface—while also questioning ideas of authorship, representation, and control,” she told.
The museum’s exhibition, “MoCP at Fifty: Collecting Through the Decades,” on view through May 16, includes photograms by Bertha E. Jaques, who arranged botanical specimens on light-sensitive paper to register their forms directly. The effect is both precise and ghostly: a record made by contact rather than depiction.
That logic has deep roots in modern art. In 1920s Paris, Man Ray placed thumbtacks, wire coils, and a comb on photosensitive paper, then exposed the sheet to light. The resulting images, which he called rayographs, blurred the boundary between object and image and fit naturally within Dada and Surrealist circles. A decade later, László Moholy-Nagy brought related experiments to Chicago, where he founded the New Bauhaus and popularized the term photogram. Artists such as Evelyn Statsinger later extended the form with a more whimsical sensibility.
The medium is also visible in contemporary booths at The Photography Show, which runs April 22 to 26 at New York’s Park Avenue Armory. Marshall Gallery is showing chromogenic photograms by Fabiola Menchelli, whose folded compositions push the form toward sculptural abstraction. Edwynn Houk Gallery is presenting a Man Ray rayograph made with a lightbulb, while Glitterman Gallery is exhibiting Jean-Pierre Sudre’s “Matériographie,” made through the Mordançage process.
Irene Papaefthemiou, associate director at The Photography Show, said the appeal lies partly in how these works honor photography’s origins while stretching its conventions. Bryan Graf, who began working seriously with photograms as a Yale graduate student in 2008, is among the artists carrying the method forward.
At a moment when AI and digital editing continue to unsettle photography’s relationship to truth, camera-less work offers a quieter proposition: an image shaped by touch, chemistry, and light itself.
