Photography Upside Down

In Art History, photography without a camera is associated primarily with artists of the 1920s avant-garde like Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy and Christian Schad. The history of this process of producing images by placing objects onto a light-sensitive surface which is then exposed to light, however, predates the beginnings of photography as such. In the early 1980s, Floris Neusüss and Renate Heyne began to intensively research the history of the medium and the object-sensitive possibilities of presenting photograms in an art context. They reprographed all the unique works of historical and contemporary artists working in the medium of the photogram that could be found and compiled a large collection of specialist literature.

The »Fotogramm-Archiv HeyneNeusüss« at the ZKM | Karlsruhe, which grew in the context of this collecting and publishing activity, forms the basis for a seminar on the history of the photogram. Within the framework of the seminar at KIT, the students will index and describe the works of selected artists on the basis of art historical sources. In addition to archival practice, basic techniques in photography-specific preservation will be taught.