Drawing with a camera

You can use a camera to draw with, just as you can use so many other things that you don't normally think of as drawing tools. But in order to use a camera more like a drawing implement I like to think of the old northern European definition of drawing, a definition that suggests that you need to 'drag' the images out of the world.

The verb 'to draw' comes from the same linguistic root as in a horse 'drawing' a cart. It means to drag, pull, or bear weight.  The Middle English word was “drawen,” the Old English “dragan” and the Old Norse, “draga,” meaning of course to drag.  The German word is “tragen,” meaning to bear or carry.  Just as in an earlier post we looked at a hypothetical Indo-European base, for the word 'art' which was 'rt', in proto Indo-European, we have the word “dherach-,” meaning to pull or draw along.  In this case to draw means to act upon something and make it move.  

By thinking of your camera as a drawing tool, you can perhaps see it as something that you can move through the world, and as it is moved it leaves traces of its movement. 

The first ‘camera’ I ever thought of using in this way was an A4 size flat bed scanner. It was one of those that you could remove the lid, so you could place it directly on a surface and scan whilst dragging the scanner over the surface it was scanning. Things have moved on technically since then and there are now some reasonably cheap hand-held scanners, that when used for image-making can connect a physical, embodied gesture with an industrial, mechanical process. The artist Lewis Chaplin ‘draws’ with hand-held scanners, ‘by manipulating their direction, speed and position ’ he says they... 'compresses the performance of photography into something very dense’. He goes on to state, ‘A scanner is really just another type of camera and so I began to use the hand-held scanner like it was one, trying to give it some agency. I took it out onto the streets and started to use it as an image-making tool, recording the surfaces around me’.

Lewis Chaplin: scanner image

You can also use your mobile phone camera like a scanner. Just hover it over a surface and keep pressing the exposure button. 

The beginning of a self portrait using a smartphone

The continuation of a self portrait using a hand held scanner

Another way to think of the idea of drawing is simply to act upon something and make it move. This could be as simple as using your camera or smartphone as you walk past or through an environment. 

Walking through grass

The idea of recording from a low viewpoint begins to connect the process of dragging with that of passing through. 

But how do you give the environment more traction? One way is to make whatever is being recorded much more difficult to see. For instance if light levels are very low, or so high that images are bleached out. It could be that you are so close to the subject that it becomes unrecognisable, or only a small part ever becomes visible. Perhaps there are barriers between you and the thing seen, such as frosted glass or translucent perspex, An old mirror with silver removed would perhaps only reflect fragments of reality, could the world be photographed through this mirror?

Eugenia Raskopoulos Diglossia 2009

Jacky Redgate Light Throw (Mirrors) I 2009

We tend to think of the world as always being 'in focus' but what if it is not? When you look through an Argos catalogue, every object photographed in it is something to possess, so each one is always in focus. But what would be the opposite of a catalogue of things that we might want to possess? 

John Hilliard

Hilliard uses two different shutter speeds to establish a time difference between two images of the same people, the slow speed creating an ambiguity that allows the audience to conjecture what might have happened in terms of the relationship established in the left hand frame. 

Shop window: Eugène Atget 1910

Reflective surfaces confuse the eye and slow down the read as two images combine. Atget was one of the earliest photographers to become fascinated by complexity and distortion, rather than the power of photography to document the world. 

Perhaps the biggest issue at the centre of all this is how we see the world. Is it something to own or possess? If so, we will develop a way of recording it that singles out things in such a way that we can 'own' them or frame them for possession. However if we understand the world as something we are immersed in, something that we are interconnected with, or locked into its systems and processes, then we need a different way of recording a situation rather than preserving a selected moment, or standing outside of the world and framing it. 

If I go back to the etymological root of the word 'draw', we can perhaps use it to help us open out a different way of using photography. When a field is ploughed the plow is dragged through the ground and as it is dragged it pulls things up from under the ground, things that were 'in the dark' and brings them back to the surface, back into light. Farmers sometimes finding old Roman coins or other treasures as they drag their plows through the soil. 

The plants that will be grown in the prepared 'broken' soil will live two lives. One through their roots, whereby they sense out a relationship between the elements and creatures of the earth, where they interconnect with fungal message systems, find a home alongside earthworms and form an intermingling with bacteria and other micro-organisms, so that the mineral nutrients that they are embedded into can be shape shifted into food stuffs; the other life will be in the light.

The elements that compose your camera or smartphone were once embedded into the ground, but at some point they were dug out or pulled up into the air by what would have been a far more destructive process. Metals such as copper, gold and silver for wiring, lithium and cobalt for the battery, and aluminium, silicon, oxygen and potassium for the glass screen, would all have been mined. Oil is extracted by deeply inserted into the earth pipelines before it is used to make the plastic for a smartphone case and rare earth elements, such as yttrium, terbium and dysprosium, are used to ensure that screen vibration produces the beautiful colours that are now required. The elements that compose your smartphone were also once in the dark. As you use it you are 'bringing it out into the light', you can now unearth its possibility, but what 'possibility' will you reveal? 

Can you re-insert this light sensitive machine back into the world in some way? The word 'photography' literally means to draw with light. To draw is to drag, to pull out; so can you 'pull out' of the world an awareness of itself? Can the smartphone become a tool for enlightenment? 

A plant lives two lives, one underground and the other one in the air. It breathes in carbon dioxide, and interacts with light to produce energy and oxygen, this photosynthesis creating food for all the creatures of the world. A plant's leaf is its camera, leave something on the lawn for a few days and then pick it up and you will have made a photograph. Whatever was left on the lawn, becoming a negative, a negative revealed as a yellowed form because it is not exposed to the energy of the sun's rays. That familiar green is there because chlorophyll is green, a pigment that absorbs blue and red light. Pigments absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others. A green pigment is therefore one that absorbs all of the wavelengths of light except green. So plants are green because chlorophyll reflects green light, or another way of putting it is that green light is the only wavelength the leaf isn't using to store energy or make sugar.

Grass is very sensitive to electrical charge and if present during the time when lightening hits the ground, the electrical discharge will leave a tree like ghost of itself. 

A lightening 'drawing' in grass

The lightening drawing is simply a ghost image of a process, but what it does reveal is how certain forms of interconnectedness appear over and over again. This could be a drawing of a tree, its branches dividing in a 'dendritic' system like tree root patterns or river systems. 

A river system in Tibet

So can the camera be re-inserted back into the earth from which it came from? Can it operate more like its precursor, the leaf, can its 'photosynthesis' produce new life, create an awareness of possibilities that are not so much about ownership as about revealing processes and interconnectedness? Can it be dragged along and drawn into a new life in the light? 

See also:

Drawing with light part one

Drawing with light part two

Drawing with light part three

Drawing with the sun's light and ritual

More details on drawing and smartphones

The camera and the body

Drawing and ritual: Leeds City Art Gallery

Roger Ackling: Bird: Sunlight on wood 1974

There is an exhibition of work at the Leeds City Art Gallery as part of the Yorkshire Sculpture International, that you might easily walk past and not notice, as it concerns small discrete objects that were used as part of three artists' performative works and personal rituals. This small self contained exhibition looks at the work of artists that made their reputations during the 1970s, and therefore I was very interested in how their various sensibilities overlapped with my own, as they emerged as artists at exactly the same time as myself.
I was particularly interested in the work of Roger Ackling. For much of his career he made work using a magnifying glass to focus bright sunlight onto the surface of found wooden objects, and in the process burning lines and dots, which for him became a sort of meditative mark making. The wood he used was usually found, often on a beach, but it could be from anywhere, and his only tool was the magnifying glass. He in this way was able to re-assert the position of the sun as central to all things seen. His work reminds us of the power of the sun to transmit energy to the Earth and in doing so power vegetable, animal and mineral life. These small drawings on wood, are objects that have a sensibility that could have been arrived at thousands of years ago. I was reminded of constructions like Stonehenge and Newgrange, constructions that were also celebrations of the sun, but on a larger scale. There is a lot of hand eye co-ordination and control in his drawings. Each line positioned very carefully in relation to the others, until a perfectly formed rhythmic surface is developed. 

Roger Ackling

Ackling's friend Richard Long tells of Ackling suggesting driving to Cornwall trailing a pencil on a piece of string on the road, and returning by the same route trailing a rubber. This was back in 1968, a time when Ackling had already developed a minimalist sensibility, one that would find full expression in the use of a magnifying glass and forgotten wooden fragments. It is also worthwhile thinking about the fact that in making work of this sort he was dealing with sustainability issues well before they were seen as essential.

Keir Smith made drawings in an indirect way, as part of a method of investigating his subject matter and developing ideas. In the early 1980s Smith began to start turning process into performance, creating a series of sculptures and installations as a way of documenting his interaction with the landscape.

Keir Smith

Keir Smith

Smith at one point was making drawings by using metal stencils and then scorching or burning images through the stencils onto paper. The stencils were kept in special handmade leather pouches, which were worn by the artist as a sort of tool belt, the perfomative act and associated equipment being just as important as the drawings that emerged from the process.

Every profession has its tool kit, leather belts designed to carry as wide a range of tools as possible have always been excellent aids for performance artists as much as make-up artists.

Probably the most well known image of an artist carrying his kit out of the studio is this one of Courbet, notice the roll of canvas, folded easel and stretcher bars

Martin Rogers was known for his artist's books as well as a wide ranging idiosyncratic practice. The present exhibition presents some of his drawings for objects as well as the objects themselves. These objects are made beautifully as if by a cabinet maker and they suggest that they have emerged from a society that used them for complex rituals, rituals that in particular would involve some sort of rhythmic sound making. The drawings on display show Rogers thinking through the various possibilities and forms that these objects could possibly have, as well as visualising their making process. 

Martin Rogers 

All three artists had a performative aspect to their work and to some extent this exhibition of objects and drawings misses the point that these artists were trying to make. The boundaries between art and life were becoming blurred, artists such as Alan Kaprow were very influential at this time, his "happenings" and "environments" were the precursors to what would be called performance art, and his essays set out a series of approaches to understanding the paradoxical relationship between art and life and the nature of meaning. The putting of this type of work behind exhibition glass, if we are not careful, re-introduces the divide between how we think about life and how we experience it. 

The other artist that I remember being of vital importance at this time was Robert Smithson, the detail below of a drawing of stars from one of Keir Smith's drawings in particular reminded me of Smithson's cosmological approach. Smith's drawing of a drawing held down by stones, suggests that the artist should be making drawings out in the landscape and not in the studio, especially as in this case, if the drawing is of star patterns seen at night. 

If we take a typical work by Robert Smithson, such as his ‘St. John in the Desert’, whereby an old engraving of St John is surrounded by collages of electrical diagrams, force-fields and other technical readouts from science manuals and place it next to his essay on Robert Morris; we can think of these two visual/written texts as containing ideas that could flow between each other, intellectual energy at times being converted into electrical flow and vice versa. This perhaps gives an idea of how Smithson's influence worked at the time. 

Robert Smithson: St John in the Desert

This is a short extract from Smithson’s essay on Robert Morris.

'Descartes' cosmology is brought to a standstill. Movement in Morris's work is engulfed by many types of stillness: delayed action, inadequate energy, general slowness, an all over sluggishness. The ready-mades are, in fact, puns on the Bergsonian concept of "creative evolution" with its idea of "ready made categories." Says Bergson, "The history of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making to measure." But it is just such an "impossibility" that appeals to Duchamp and Morris. With this in mind, Morris's monstrous "ideal" structures are inconsequential or uncertain ready-mades, which are definitely outside of Bergson's concept of creative evolution. If anything, they are uncreative in the manner of a 16th-century alchemist-philosopher-artist. C.G. Jung's writing on "The Materia Prima" offers many clues in this direction. Alchemy, it seems, is a concrete way of dealing with sameness. In this context, Duchamp and Morris may be seen as artificers of the uncreative or decreators of the Real. They are like the 16th-century artist Parmigianino, who "gave up painting to become an alchemist." This might help us to understand both Judd's and Morris's interest in geology. It is also well to remember that Parmigianino and Duchamp both painted "Virgins," when they did paint. Sydney Freedberg observed in the work of Parmigianino, if not in fact, at least in idea'.

There was a sort of ‘hippy’ feeling to all this, and one that for many artists at this time, myself included, seemed a positive and morally uplifting direction to take. That desire for everything to be joined up, for an invisible universe that lay behind this everyday world to be revealed in all its complex glory, was I remember vitally important to the rise of conceptualism. We move in Smithson’s essay from Duchamp, through Descartes, touching on Jung and use a late Renaissance painter as a touchstone that can take us into the world of alchemy. Smithson goes on to examine the nature of thermodynamics and then reflect on the structure of time. Old myths and religious beliefs, as rethought by Joseph Campbell were for our generation as important as the more technological writings of Buckminster Fuller. Fuller invented the term 'ephemeralization' or the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing." At the time there was a high degree of optimism that science would soon be fused with some sort of mythic understanding of universal principles and that what used to be called 'magic' was simply some sort of future science. Perhaps we need a dose of that optimism again, and seeing the work of these now all dead artists of my own generation reminded me that art and life always need to be entwined together. 

Every now and again I review an exhibition in the City Art Gallery that I think expands or deepens an idea of what drawing is concerned with, as a reminder to keep going and checking out what is being presented. There will always be a wide range of other approaches to art making represented, at the moment there is an excellent exhibition 'Woodwork' to see, that includes work from various historical periods and from non western cultures. It is easy to ignore something just because it is on your doorstep, make sure you make full use of an excellent local resource. 

Find out what's on here: Leeds Art Gallery  
What's on at the Tetley, where there is another excellent exhibition on at the moment. 

Some earlier posts reflecting on what could be seen in the city art gallery:

Beuys and Cotman
Sculptors' Drawings
Narrative Objects
A gallery presentation of large drawings