CategoriesStyles and Movements
Abstract Photography
Photographs without a clearly recognisable subject, made through close framing, light, chemistry or work on the print itself.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for Abstract Photography are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
Photography's reputation as a faithful recorder made abstraction in the medium a deliberate provocation. In 1917 Alvin Langdon Coburn photographed through an arrangement of mirrors to make his Vortographs, and within a few years Christian Schad, Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy were laying objects directly on light-sensitive paper to make photograms with no camera at all.
Other photographers found abstraction in the world by framing tightly: Aaron Siskind's close views of peeling paint and weathered walls in the 1940s and 1950s read as flat, gestural compositions. Since the 1980s many artists have pushed further into the material of the image. Adam Fuss makes large photograms of water and light, Garry Fabian Miller exposes paper to light passed through glass vessels and liquids, and Marco Breuer scratches, burns and abrades photographic paper. These works reveal what photography is made of: light, time and a sensitive surface.
Related artists
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