Schadograph

Christian Schad was the first early 20th–century modernist to rediscover and work with the photogram. An image made without a camera by placing an object directly on photosensitive paper and exposing the paper to light, the photogram had been known since photography’s beginnings but was newly explored by the avant–garde for the abstract, formal possibilities it afforded. Tristan Tzara, the leader of the Dada art movement, who first owned this work, dubbed these photograms “Schadographs,” a play on both the artist’s name and the shadowy forms he created with household detritus. Here, the lowly materials of dust and shoestring are ennobled, transformed by the action of light. The first fine artist to revive the photogram technique after World War I, Christian Schad is also the only one who liberated his images from the factory-made, rectilinear format standard for photographs. The unusual shapes of Schad’s photograms echo the sculptural wood reliefs that he made during the same period.