experimental vision.

The project on Cliche Verres got me thinking about the photograph's capabilities to reproduce information, not just what is gathered through a lens, but information of all sorts, scholarly, scientific, trivial, literary; anything that can be represented in two dimensions can be infinitely and effectively reproduced with photographic processes perfected over one hundred years ago. Before lenses were used to document plant species a silhouette could be made with a photogram. Wikipedia dates the printing press to the Holy Roman Empire circa 1440, so it had a bit of a head start over the photogram, which dates to the early 1840's, but even with the presence of the printing press Sir Herschel took the time to explore the possibility of reproducing scientific notes through photography. It is possible to imagine how a skilled developer could be much more productive reproducing documents through a photographic process than with a printing press. While the process would be more exacting and chemically complex, the technician would not have to place and ink wood blocks, which occurs to me as a miserable task.

This is not to say a photogram must reproduce exclusively two dimensional images, the compression and abstraction of three dimensional forms onto the two dimensional plane is intriguing to me. I would like to experiment with placing objects directly on coated paper and exposing directly, with no negative. After testing various objects for their flattened quality I would like to produce some 2-D abstractions of some interesting forms.