Cameraless Photos

 

Robert Heinecken - Recto/Verso Portfolio, 1989

 

There was a photo exhibition at the Art Institute about 10 years ago that primarily featured Polaroids. In one of the works, the photos were flipped so that it showed just the backs of the photos with writing on them. As you read them, an image would appear in your imagination. In many ways, this is how we are generating images (and songs) now using natural language and AI. But it's not us doing the imagining.

Ever since I started the "Photos Taken On A Weekend" project I have been taking photographs with that theme, i.e. something looking like it was taken on a weekend, or could have likely been taken on a weekend as opposed to another day of the week.

The "cameraless photo" in the traditional definition is a photo that was produced without a camera. The photogram is the prime example, but there was also photographism, a term coined in the 1980s by the late Robert Heinecken who made cameraless photos by making photo collages from images in magazines. In the 1970s "Pictures Generation" artists such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Sarah Charlesworth were doing something similar.
 

As in the Polaroid exhibition here are just the descriptions of photos taken on a weekend:

The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio, looking northwest. Since I like a very high-contrast image, I darkened the shadows and dodged the highlights in the upstairs window.

A very steep angle of the side of a building, punctuated by an evergreen. It reminded me of the slope of a Doppler waveform.

The title was inspired by a word that author Brene Brown had used in one of her books, describing the point at which someone “hits the ceiling”. Visually what I liked was the irony of the chandelier as being a symbol of wealth, hanging in the dark gangway.

A slightly blurry overhead shot of the shadows of a group of people passing below me. As I recall, I was leaning perilously over a wall to get the shot, and to this day when I look at it I re-experience the acrophobia.

A stage set where it appears that the sunlight is coming out from the inside of the building.

A Chicago Transit Authority employee station at Navy Pier. Looking at it in retrospect, the plaid curtains in the center look like a pair of pajamas.

Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter who painted primarily bottles, vases and bowls. Whenever I see things like this it always reminds me of his work.

The Bughouse Square debates happen every July at Washington Square Park. This year they had an upright piano in the park that anyone could play. I had taken a series of shots, capturing the pose of the woman at the left, and chose this one with her looking at the camera.

A photograph through "crazed" glass. This type of glass was used frequently in the 19th century but wasn't called "crazed" then. (10/2016)

A street corner on Clark Street in Chicago, not far from Wrigley Field. Beautifully banal, with some je ne sais quoi. It is full of interesting detail: the positions of the people, the odd arrangement of the signage, that it was a beautiful day, that the light pole is at an angle, and so on.

I've been passing by this for some time, but it was only after the release of the 2018 film Slender Man that made me want to photograph it. It is obviously a water stain of some kind that is highly anthropomorphic.

This was taken with the Panorama feature on the iPhone while traveling on a train. The image was “broken” by the fact that the camera couldn't be moved in the complete arc, and consequently, all the frames were compressed up against the first frame, creating a kind of “fault”.