Creativity

Creativity

by William Lulow

Recently I saw a great exhibition of some of the works of a photographer named Man Ray. Most people who know photography know of his work and perhaps have seen a few of his images in books, magazines or in other exhibitions. But Man Ray was an innovator. He kind of discovered a process called “solarization” which was accidentally, really discovered by his assistant and partner, Lee Miller in about 1922 or so. She managed to turn on a light midway through the development process and noticed that the negative had become partially developed and parts of it were both positive and negative at the same time. He then began experimenting with the process and finally refined it to the point where he could control it. These solarizations were like bas-reliefs in a way because when light hit the exposed grains of silver that made up the emulsion, they created an edge around the figures in the pictures. I have experimented with this technique many times. Here is one of my results:

You can see what the effect is and how it creates a negative and positive image at the same time. This one was reproduced digitally and enhanced somewhat to show what happens to the edges of the figure under this process.

The interesting thing about this however, is that it was made originally, by accident. This the highlight of the creative process itself. The artist’s mind is always striving to see what it can do with the materials and the presentation that is currently available. I made this image originally in the darkroom and managed to re-create it with the digital processes in Photoshop. This was a discovery process in itself because I had to experiment with the tools I had in the software to try and approximate the original, continuous-tone picture. This is the heart of the creative process itself. It comes from finding something by accident and through constant and persistent experimentation, you arrive at something totally new. That’s creating something!

Ray also experimented with what he called “Rayograms,” but were actually termed “Photograms” in darkroom language. A photogram is a silhouette or, more accurately, a picture of the shape of an object. Here is an example:

This was made by placing some objects on a piece of light-sensitive photographic paper and making an exposure. It is a silhouette insofar as, to the photo paper, the light is coming from behind the subject which then casts a shadow to make the shape. Anything solid will reproduce as white because it will block the light totally. Here, the loupe, being transparent in part, reproduces more as a gray tone. When I was just learning darkroom techniques as a youngster, I would often make these if I didn’t actually go out and make an actual image with my camera. I also wanted to experiment with the various tones that certain objects made.

Here is another kind of bas-relief image made with using a filter of the same name in Photoshop:

Even though this is a two-dimensional image, of course, it has the illusion of being three-dimensional because the shadows created seem to “lift” the image right off the paper. You can also notice here that the grain or “noise” produced by this digital filter is something I would need to work on eliminating in order to get a much clearer picture.

I have written about my other experiments with what I call “Solarized Extrusions” previously, but here is one more:

Here, the technique involved first making a solarization so that some of the tones were reversed and highlighted. Then I added the “extrusion” filter to give all the highlighted areas a kind of impressionistic feel. I have mentioned previously, that these techniques require a lot of experimentation to find the effects that you want. I tried different brush sizes, textures, hues and color saturations until I achieved a look with which I was most happy.

One thing that was evident from the Man Ray exhibition was that as the photographer grew and incorporated better lighting techniques and more interesting compositions, his pictures improved drastically. One has to remember that back in those days, the only cameras that were used were view cameras, large cumbersome things with very slow lenses and a front and back connected by a bellows. The photographer had to keep a dark cloth over his head so that he could see the image on the ground glass, which was upside down and backwards. There were no prisms available to turn the image right side up! Not only that, but many of Man Ray’s early images were just contact prints from his 4×5″ negatives. Perhaps he did not have an enlarger to make the images bigger. But the small images contained an amazing amount of detail, as negatives that big usually do, and they are significant for that reason alone.

Here are a couple of images from the exhibition: (I had permission to take photographs at the exhibition)

In this picture of photographer Bernice Abbott, note the composition with the shadow on the background. If you just put your subject up against a wall and shine a light on her, you will get a nicely lit portrait, but the background will have a shadow on it. So, this image was made before Mr. Ray thought or knew about making the shadow fall behind the subject and not on the background.

In this image of Jeanne Bucher, Ray has learned how to photograph a person with a white background and no shadow. It is interesting to see the progression of images from the beginning of a career because it usually shows growth in technique, expression, composition and the use of available tools to make the desired impression.

That’s what we try to do in the field of picture making. We try to make images that have a certain “staying power” and will be here for people to view and react to for years to come.