Photograms for Stereograph

Advised by Katarina Burin, Laura A. Frahm, and Lindsey Lodhie
Harvard University, Visual and Environmental Studies
May 2019

This piece is named after the image “t or 20” of the Stereographs that were made for Walter Gropius’ House in 1944 by the photographer Louis Sutro. This Stereograph was the first one to be built for Harvard University, and is now lost in the archives. Accompanied by a description narrating each image, the last one of the series catched my eye, and became a direct source of inspiration:

“t or 20.
Dining Room Table, Night Illumination: Lamps and indirect floodlights as nighttime careful use of illumination provides an interest to replace that afforded in day-time views through the window. Here in the dining room, all illumination is projected from a spotlight in the ceiling onto the table and is reflected back into the faces of the diners. The effect is to permit you to see well all those around the dining room table but see only darkness beyond, with the intimacy of candle light.” (Sutro, Louis. Gropius House Stereographs , 1916.)

This work aims to take the viewer into a virtual ir-reality, of camera-less photographies of inexistent galaxies, ephemeral with light, registered in paper through distinct materialities. Original and omnipresent, pairs of images convert into a single one, that inverts the three-dimensionality of the stereographic process by turning contact prints into imaginary spaces. The viewer might wonder, are these from remote galaxies, or granular microscopic details?

This series of “Photogenic Drawings” (Barry Bergdoll’s term for describing Moholy-Nagy’s photograms) are performed with the challenges of some almost forgotten methods, amidst today’s saturation of images.

Replacing day time views with darkness, light spots are reflected into sight, becoming all the places at once, that cannot blink inside a camera.