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, the theatre, perspective, photography, light and film

Marion Palace, Ohio: Hiroshi Sugimoto

The word 'photography' means literally 'drawing with light', and I have referred to this connection with drawing several times before. But sometimes a photographer seems to make the connection so clear that it is useful to unpick why a little more. 
Hiroshi Sugimoto came to the attention of the art world in the 1980s because of his photographs of cinema interiors. The images were made while films were showing, but in order for the details of a cinema's interior to register on the film, the camera's shutter was held open for very long exposures. This resulted in a series of images whereby the films being shown were all whited out, their over exposure erasing them and yet in some way also 'recording' the time of their passing, condensing the durations of various films into the frozen moment of a still photograph. These photographs are for me very close to a drawing practice, because they are photographs that can be both read as images that belong to the 'simultaneous now' and as images that can be used to unfold time. 

Movie Theatre, Canton Palace, Ohio, 1980: Hiroshi Sugimoto

The fact that these images also highlight the older relationship between film and theatre is also important. The older use of cinemas was as theatres, hence several conventions of the theatre continued as the use was changed, in particular the continuing use of the stage curtain and of decorative interiors that often echoed the forms that the architect Inigo Jones (1573–1652) had devised as sets for royal masques, and which he later used to design 17th century theatre interiors. Jones was in many ways referring back to the work of Vitruvius and in response to his reflections on Vitruvius he also introduced the first proscenium arch into theatres in England; the decorative architectural frame that presided over the stage. Echoes of all of these things can be seen in the cinema photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto. 

The drama of the theatre interior has always interested film makers and the type of compositions that result in framing composites of close and far views was something storyboard artists such as Mentor Huebner, have often used very powerfully. It is as if the history of film becomes embedded into the ideas of how 'dramatic' viewpoints are arrived at, in particular those views we have of the stage from high up in the gods or upper balconies. 

Mentor Huebner

I think the rectangular 'crop marks' in the shape of a film frame that Huebner draws on top of his image, forms a beautiful moment of connection between the edges of the two disciplines of film and drawing. The drawn frame sitting astride both disciplines as the image beneath moves from the world of drawn thinking into the world of lens selection. This 'framing' of things being an aspect of language that opens out into a set of related ways of thinking that 'frames' ideas and presents them as if they can be cut out from the world. Essentially the frame of the lens, gives us the idea or reinforces the idea that certain things can be selected and plucked out of the wholeness that is the world. But in reality this isn't the case, all things are in fact interconnected and any one action will impact on everything else. Sometimes I think it is the framing of lens based media that lies behind the fact that we cannot see how consumerism is destroying the world. A photograph of plastic islands floating in the sea is not connected to me, it is cut out of the world by the sharp edges of the image's frame. 

These edges are old ones and they belong to the world of the theatre and the perspective frame. The events that take place on the stage have edges, the front edge of the stage is a dividing line between the audience and what occurs, and the audience understands that this edge is a line between what is real and what is an enactment. A theatrical production can unfold through time, with a beginning and an end and in doing so is designed to help the audience understand or become aware of some aspect of what we often call the human condition. This 'human condition' is itself a sort of framing device. In cutting our experiences and life away from the rest of the world, we have come up with a way of presenting situations as if the world itself is simply a stage for humans to act out their various lives. Early perspective drawings, the layout of the theatre and the invention of camera obscuras, are very closely linked in this conception. As lens based images become ubiquitous, we find our society experiencing the real world as if it is theatre. 

During the Renaissance there were several attempts to create stage perspectives, including those drawn by Sebastiano Serlio (1475-1554), and published in his book 'Architettura'. Serlio's drawings show stadium seating set out around an orchestra, in the centre of which only the duke or prince would sit.  The stage is set at the eye level of the duke, who therefore is the only one with a perfect view of the spectacle. The space is also raked, to increase the illusion of depth via perspective. This control of the eye point essentially gives the viewer power. A power that we forget is still there when a viewpoint for a photograph is selected.  Serlio designed three all purpose settings to place in this 'picture frame', one for tragedy, one for comedy, and one for pastorals. These needed rapid changes of scene and this was initially achieved by the use of a periaktos, an ancient theatrical device consisting of a revolving triangular form made of wood. While one scene was presented to the audience, the other two could be changed. Not only was the eye point controlled but the 'mood' or content of the play was suggested by the set design. Together these controls simplify and clarify the fictive world of the theatre, so that audiences can experience a fable like view of life. It is the frame that allows this to happen, but the things framed by cameras are not fables they are slices of reality and this is I would suggest a big problem.  

In the image below a slice of the world is captured inside a camera obscura and is being contemplated upon by a human being, who in effect turns his back on the world in order to contemplate it. In many ways the interior of the camera obscura resembles a theatre, a box like space within which an isolated set of events can be explored. 

The world of microscopes and telescopes takes the concept of separation and moves it on into an even further dimension of literal distancing.

Galileo in his studio

A 148 feet long focal length Keplerian astronomical refracting telescope 1673

As more and more optical devices were invented, you could argue that human beings became more and more distanced from reality. Humans were no longer 'believing their own eyes' and were beginning to rely on enhanced optical instruments to reveal what had previously not been apparent. The craters on the moon shown by this drawing by Galileo below, are evidence of a new reality born of a fusion between humans and technology. 

Galileo: drawing of the moon:1611

If we no longer believe our own eyes everything becomes fictional and if it is, it is very hard to respond in ways that reflect the actual reality of a situation. This is why we find it so hard to respond to global warming or other threats to our environment revealed to us via technology. Like Sugimoto's photographs the central content is wiped away, whited out due to overexposure, which is perhaps why a return to old fashioned looking and drawing might help us take situations for real.

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger a Swiss scientific draughtswoman, draws images of mutant insects that she finds around nuclear power plants, she finds them by collecting insect samples from contaminated areas, first of all spotting them by eye, but then she does use a microscope to ensure precision, as she makes her very precise renderings. Her work reminds us that we can still use hand made imagery to question the status quo and that it is possible to work outside of the lens based imagery frame. 

Cornelia Hesse-Honegger: Mutant insects

See also:

Photography as an extension of drawing

The frame and the screen

Anamorphic perspectives 

Architectural Perspectives

Perspective

Cinematic drawing in a digital age

New wine in old bottles

Chagall: Stained glass window maquette

Stained glass is a very old art form and it is a vitally important conceptual idea as well as a physical process. On the one hand it involves line drawing. When designing for stained glass everything is reduced to line because the leading that holds the glass in place is a material that is designed to operate as a linear element. I. e. it is concerned with edges. In this case the edges of colour fields, which are themselves solid pieces of glass cut to shape. Stained glass is also drawing directly with light and as such as a medium it is a wonderful metaphor for the spiritual, the ephemeral and the fusion of light and life. 

Chagall

It's not just about leaded lines holding on to clearly delineated edges of coloured glass. It can be, and Matisse is an example of an artist that used stained glass in this way, but more sophisticated uses often use a pocketed aesthetic, whereby the hard edges of the leading are integrated with more delicate drawing that is worked into the glass itself. 

Matisse

If you look at the 19th century stained glass panel from 1845 below, you can easily see how the bird that represents the holy Ghost has been cut into segments by leading and then within the segments the detailing of feathers and the bird's face have been worked directly onto the glass by drawing with glass paint. Two different types of image making coming together in one artefact. You can see the same type of effect in the Burn Jones window. The face using a glass painting technique and some of the other details look as if they use a sort of paint scratching technique, whereby you coat the glass in black and scratch away the paint to reveal your form. The horizontal bar is a strengthening support, the window usually being attached to it using copper wire and the bar being set into the surrounding window frame. 

Burn Jones

We are so used to stained glass being the religious medium of choice that we can forget that like all media it can be used to carry a variety of other content, but its association with the Christian religion does bring with it a certain set of values that can come into play when the subject matter is very non-Christian. 
This is the case with Judith Schaechter's work. The techniques and references she uses are references to the religious art of stained glass, but her subject matter is instead very personal. 

Judith Schaechter

Rather than stained glass windows she often uses light boxes, which you could argue is a contemporary secular equivalent. But she still uses the old stained glass craft to assemble the images, therefore she keeps the craft associations with windows, holding a balance between references from past traditions and new associations. 

Judith Schaechter: My one desire

Sometimes she returns to old Bible tales, but gives them a contemporary makeover, the point being that old techniques and associated crafts can always be re-visited and because the time you live in is very different to when these ideas were initially visualised, new narratives or different approaches to the telling of old stories will always mean that the message is renewed. 

Peter Young

Peter Young uses traditional techniques to build his own private worlds, and in this case he uses the ability of stained glass panels to also be very painterly.  

I have looked at working in glass myself and as I have been working with a very old idea, the making of votives to help people externalise their inner aches and pains, thought I would explore the potential of glass to heighten a spiritual engagement with the idea. 

Fused glass votives

Rather than using stained glass I have used fused glass, this is in some ways harder to control, but on the other hand the fusion between different glass types can suggest a state of metamorphosis. 
It can feel as if these techniques are beyond the reach of most people, however if you research what is available in your area you will often find there are stained or fused glass adult education classes or private courses held by stained glass makers and as long as you have ideas suitable for conversion into glass, you can produce work with the help of a local craftsperson. 
Above all it is wonderful to begin an association with a new material, it is like using a language for the first time, both a way of exercising your mind as well as building a relationship that enables you and the material to say something together in a way that has never been said before. 

Coda:

If you like the idea of working in stained glass but have no resources to take it on you can always respond by making things cheaply. Raúl de Nieves was faced with a similar problem and for his show at the Whitney made a huge stained glass effect piece simply using coloured transparencies and black card. 

Raúl de Nieves

Raúl de Nieves at work

See also:

Stained glass bursary
Drawing with light
Drawing with light 2
Drawing with light 3

Drawing in colour part two
Drawing in colour part three
Drawing in colour part four
Colour names

Colour and control

Drawing in stained glass

How to work in stained glass

Using wax crayons and oil pastels

Using chalks and coloured pencils

The British Society of Master Glass Painters
Hannah Stained Glass (A local to Leeds centre: they also offer glass courses)

The materials for glass painting

Thomas Denny stained glass artist

Shadow drawing

Intersections: Anila Quayyum Agha

This installation by the Pakistani/American artist Anila Quayyum Agha, uses a central light source that casts a shadow over an entire room, to create a wonderful immersive environment that heightens a feeling of spiritual contemplation. This beautiful resolution of what is a very old idea, is something all of us can think about using and is not the property of any one artist or designer.

Hilden and Diaz

The designers Hilden and Diaz market Ernst Heinrich Haeckel inspired chandeliers; when you illuminate them they cast shadows around your room that turn it into a forest. A very similar idea to Anila Quayyum Agha's and more affordable and available to ordinary people. It also asks some questions as to the relationship between art and design. The reality is that the idea belongs to nature, i.e. to us all. 

Shadow of a plum tree cast by moonlight: David M Porter 

The sun and moon cast shadows for free and we can all benefit from the idea. Because so many of us are having to self isolate perhaps a project whereby we investigate the potential of a different way of making images would be both useful and distracting, as well as reminding us that we don't need expensive materials and equipment to make interesting images. 

This very basic video shows how you could begin a project.

The problem with working in this way is how to give your shadows sharp edges, so here is a short tutorial on how lighting works.

Hard and soft light and shadow tutorial

Using some tape, wire, scissors, a cutting knife and whatever else you might have at hand, try and transform materials you might normally throw away into something that can be used to create shadows of images related to the work you are already doing. Noble and Webster even managed accurate shadow portraits, so it literally can be images of anything. 

Noble and Webster

Make sure your light source is not a hot one, the last thing you need to do is burn the house down and that you have camera ready to record anything that looks interesting. Then try and follow the implications of what you have done. Try and film the process as well as record it as a series of static images. Then review your footage and begin the process again, this time relating what you are doing to the potential you have unearthed in the review. In this way you can begin to reveal for yourself what the project might lead to. Remember Jasper Johns and his mantra, "do something and when that's done, do something to that". 

I shall try and mix these blog posts up during these days of self isolation, sometimes putting up a practical project and at other times things to generate ideas. But remember, it is in doing things that ideas emerge, so don't think for too long about what all this might mean, just have fun playing with shadows. 

See also:

Shadows and the magic of transformation

Articulated collage and shadow play

The world is drawing itself

William Kentridge

The vignette (Includes links to other information about shadows) 

Drawing in or with Paper

Embossed surface of toilet roll paper

Some of the papers we use in everyday life are decorated as they are made, their surfaces embossed as part of the moulding process and others are embossed after they are made by having shapes pressed into their surfaces. What is interesting about these ways of marking paper is that because of surface indentations we become more aware of the importance of the angle of direction of light sources. A light falling directly in front of the image may not reveal anything, but a light source from an acute angle can reveal every textural difference. Therefore this type of drawing makes you much more aware of the complex interrelationship between light source, drawing and observer. Just to take the photograph of the humble toilet roll above, I had to move the object around and try several locations, as well as shift my own viewpoint a few times before deciding on an angle that I thought demonstrated my point well enough. 

If you make your own paper you will have I'm sure realised the potential to weave wire into your mesh, so that a 'watermark' can be made. This simply thins the paper that sits over the wire when it is as a thin pulp collected over the mesh and is often seen at its  best when you hold the paper up to the light. 

Folding or scoring paper will give you a wide range of marks depending on how you make the fold, for instance you can make a former by taping down two sheets of card with a narrow gap between them and scoring a line along this gap with a traditional bookbinder's bone folder. This gives you a line that on one side of the paper rises up like a small wall and on the other side opens out like a tiny empty canal. Every implement used to score paper will create a different mark, and the different ways that a fold can be worked on, such as by applying different amounts of pressure or working on the back of the paper with smoothing implements, again create different line types. 

Paper scoring tools

You can also sand your paper down, each movement of a sheet of sandpaper creating thousands of tiny marks, all of which can be seen if you get the light hitting the paper at the right angle or beat your paper with a hammer or other heavy tool, such as those hammers used in the silver manufacturing industry, that are used to build up beautiful textures as a silver sheet is formed. They can do the same job on thick watercolour paper, crushing the surface as it is hit, whilst at the same time building a repetitive textured surface as you overlap your hammering marks.  

Silver hammers normally used for giving textures to hammered sheets of silver

However in the printing industry the most common way of creating surface difference by using the properties of shadow is to emboss paper. This at its most basic means applying a cut out shape to the paper under great pressure. The surface of the paper is in effect crushed by the weight applied. 

The video above is interesting because it shows how someone can use a combination of new and old technology to create what they want. The tools made by the artist in this case are quite specialised and if you do want to create work in this area sometimes you do have to refine your working methods in order to get the best out of the process. 

You can also draw with specialist tools made for other purposes such as using pricking wheels made for sewing through leather, such as the one above. But the most common way of making surface textures of this sort is by using an ordinary needle. This technique can be used to create basic lines and simple drawings or the most complex images, it just depends on the amount of time you want to spend and the invention that you can put to the process. 

The artist Fu Xiaotong uses pins to create her massive drawings on handmade paper. 

Fu Xiaotong at work

In an earlier post I looked at the drawings of Frances Richardson and she has at times commented about the relationship between drawing and sculpture and in this case I believe the relationship is very close. 

So why use these techniques? There are several issues that fine art students could consider here. The first one is the 'objectness' of the papers that you use. By making the image an integral part of the paper, you can begin to separate the idea of the image, from the idea of the object. No longer do you have an idea/image/design placed on top of the paper, the paper traditionally operating as a background or support. In this case, because the image is embedded within the field of its making, it is itself now part of the object. This was part of the point Frances Richardson was making when she referred to her drawings as 'thin sculpture'. If we go back to some of the issues raised when we were looking at framing drawings, we had to explore the differences in presentation between drawings that were 'illusions' of things and drawings that were exploring the 'objectness' of flat things made of paper. Working in this way can open the debate out further. For instance compare paper folding with making embossed paper illusions such as this one below.

Embossed paper used as shallow relief

Another theoretical area that can be explored using these ideas is that of Greenberg's media specificity. If you follow the implications of his writings, paper is itself a medium and therefore its specificity is to do with what it is capable of as a medium. So instead of looking at how it can be used to carry representations of other things, such as the image above, it should be treated as something that has its own possibilities, therefore as an artist you should engage with this process of revealing possibility and in doing so you will also discover your own language. 

I am personally very interested in the relationship this type of work has with revealing light as the most important factor in seeing anything. You can make your audience much more active as they have to move around to see this type of work to its best effect and more importantly you can get your audience to focus on how a light source is effecting perception. 

There is a 'stripped down' feel to the aesthetics involved in this type of work. As colour is eliminated and all additional materials such as drawing or painterly substances are also eliminated, you can also touch upon notions of purity and truth to materials. 

Miso: New York Moon

The artist Miso in her work 'New York Moon', took maps of the New York city grid and laid them over images of the valleys and craters of the moon and then combined the images by pin pricking through both into a sheet of paper below. In this instance she is finding a new use for a very old technique of transferring drawings using pricked papers.

An old print that has been pricked in order to transfer the image

This technique goes back to the Renaissance, when painters would use holes pricked in large 'cartoon' drawings to transfer their images onto wet plaster ready for fresco painting. They used to pounce these cartoons with crushed powder or charcoal, thus leaving faint dotted lines on the wet plaster as guides within which they would paint. 

 All of these techniques depend of course on the types of paper you are using.

See also.

An introduction to paper types

How to pounce an image

If you do want to get serious about using some of these techniques, The Graphic designers guide to embossing.  is a useful starting point. 

Online books on paper

Research into paper

Paper: folding and the songs of trees

Languages of paper and cardboard

More thoughts about paper

Paper and skin

Paper as drawing material