On The Intersection of Drawing and Photography

On The Intersection of Drawing and Photography

CPR GUEST ESSAY

Strange Mechanisms, four panels (60” x 36” each), cyanotype photogram

BY STEVEN MASTROIANNI

Steven Mastroianni is an artist,
educator, musician, and radio programmer
based in Cleveland, Ohio.
www.stevenmastroianni.com 

The early history of photography takes several different paths seeking very distinct goals, all emanating from the discovery of chemical processes that would both render light and fix it in time. Leading up to the actual invention of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot experimented with sensitizing paper with sodium chloride and silver nitrate, and then placing objects directly on the paper and exposing it to sunlight to create reversed shadows of leaves, flowers, and other small items. He called these early examples at fixing an image “photogenic drawing”. Recording and drawing with light, sans camera, is photography in a pure form. 

Early adopters like Anna Adkins saw the potential of photograms to create detailed “shadows” of the botanicals she wanted to record with the cyanotype process. Practitioners in the early 20th century like Christian Schad and Man Ray came to photograms from a dadaist/surrealist perspective, embracing new ways of mechanical reproduction to create art with a modernist bent. László Moholy-Nagy went even farther in his formal embrace of the camera and other scientific technology as vehicles to produce a new kind of art that could see beyond what the eye and imagination could not.

I think often about these early attempts at “writing with light” and how the practitioners of this mysterious process must have marveled at the alchemy of turning light into silver. The transformation still enchants me every single time I see an image develop and leave eerie shadows of the objects and lines I place on the paper. 

Although I’ve made a career in photography, my background and education is actually in drawing, painting, and printmaking. And as a result, my work often straddles both worlds, using photographic processes as a medium for my drawing.

I’ve long been familiar with photograms, but my current fascination with the process actually began in 2018 when I was asked to be part of a group exhibition called “Sticks and Stones” curated by Bill Schubert at Heights Arts. Conceived as a group exhibition, artists from different disciplines were asked to explore the theme of “sticks and stones”, fundamental materials of technology and motifs from the Pleistocene to the present. Sculpture, print, rendering, and conceptual examinations of the subject were represented, with my contribution to be photographic (think “still life”). But when approached, my mind zig-zagged to something different: At the time I was filling sketchbooks with simple drawing exercises, essentially very simple, repetitive mark-making. Thinking about these marks and considering how to represent sticks and stones, it occurred to me that instead of photographing these objects, I would use sticks and stones as the actual objects, sans camera, to create photographs. By placing them directly on the photographic paper and creating a traditional photogram, I would make my marks photographically, and use sticks and stones as literal tools to draw themselves. So the intersection really does begin with drawing.

Slow Memory, three panels (60” x 42” each), silver gelatin photograms

Fathomable Sign Series, 60” x 42”, cyanotype photogram

In my work, patterns and motifs suggest rhythms, harmonies, variations and fugues, with music playing a large part in my creativity through synesthesia; I have always visualized in the abstract what I hear, and associate words and numbers with colors and patterns. In these pieces, imaginary letters and mechanisms plot an indecipherable message floating in space or under the microscope; dreamlike imagery that seems to make sense at a glance, but is fleeting. The patterns build on each other, from drawing to photogram to print, back to drawing and more experimentation. My inspiration comes from surrealism, automatism, abstraction, and free association, creating imagery derived from sounds, numbers, lights, blinks and clicks, a breeze, a rhythm. Themes are explored and expanded upon, from diagrams of strange mechanisms, to imaginary water worlds and star systems. Each one rendered as a reversed, shadowy illustration.

A far cry from the simple darkroom exercise of making photograms with keys and bric-a-brac on little sheets of paper, these pieces take on a life-sized scale. Working on panels up to 42” wide by 60” tall, I’ve pushed the limits of what I can accomplish with the materials and facilities available. Source materials consist of a mix of found objects, hand cut stencils, and drawings on translucent papers, carefully composed, exposed, and processed. These are all combined into a compositional collage, and then exposed to render them as eerie shadows of themselves on the sensitized paper. The ghost-like afterimages fool the eye and mind and transport the viewer to a realm that can only be captured with light and preserved with chemistry.

“Photography” can be loosely translated as “drawing with light”, and it’s that fundamental concept at the root of this work.

A short film about my process: