Light-in-the-Dark
The Camera Less Operator or CLO opens a visual vade mecum to the finitogram, an anonymous – Anon. – photo-object gathered from throw-aways, abandoned sheets of photographic paper bearing random chemical marks that ‘strike a pose’ as light draws.
CLO sees the once hidden, latent image become visible as the object begins at the zero of an unknown time, made somewhere in the void of a darkroom, left behind unfinished and unsigned until the photo-object is rescued by CLO, the camera less operator, in situ, a fellow light traveler; it has a story to tell.
No authors, just Anon., as names did not exist. In their place is the 19th century term ‘camera operator’ for the unnamed photographer, an unknown person who explores new themes and visual language, pioneers in the global category of ‘vernacular photography’.
We all have seen these pictures, lost and found in auction houses to flea markets.
This photo-object has traveled to create a new version of Duchamp’s ‘ready-made’ where time and chemistry partner with “light drawing” anew. The object’s name, finitogram, from the Italian non finito for incomplete works of art, now re-interprets the photogram, its legacy, and those practitioners. It reverses and expands the circle of time in its image-making toward an end to the use of the artist’s hand, while forefronting Conceptual Art, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, while also introducing an aporia to the medium’s “picture signs” found in traditional genres of landscape, portrait, still life, and so on.
What is Art … Art & Photography?
CLO and the finitogram project is a portfolio of small pictures of nothing that began in conditions of amber low light, often a sight (less) darkroom based in time and chemistry as the light-sensitive paper goes from its “light tight” black bag, from total darkness, from invisibility to begin its journey. These finitograms are unpredictable as they change in subtle non-color to hue in palette and enlarge in form. As the chemical clock ticks, this new getting ready-to-be-made from its once unfinished state, by time and by light, unfolds; it becomes finished, a finitogram. The historic photogram now re-named as ready-made adds to CLO’s handbook guide through photography’s nearly two centuries’ arc of light, photogram, non-color.
CLO as the 21st century camera-less operator visually consults William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins, this dual powerhouse of 19th century game changers. From Talbot’s negative-to-positive duality of the photogram-as-image doubled, the axis of a mirror reversed while Talbot’s soft-focus, non-color compositions in blurry outlines see light’s ‘shadow’ while light’s first traces see color-as-light referencing Anna Atkins’ cyanotype images.
CLO’s chemically induced palette over time whispers, subtle abstract forms, seen in a “Finitogram” — oxidized chemical sprays in pinks, creme de la creme, mottle grey with black — a cascade of images that say – ‘je ne said quoi’.
CLO finds the performance in the ‘black box’ of the darkroom, where pictures of nothing start blank, then finish. This image making process forms a “linked ring” to the Surrealist game of “exquisite corpse”. What better way to make new and unique photo-objects than to play that parlor game, to find new ways to make art through the unconscious, a game of hide-and-seek.
Hide the pictures, seek them out, do nothing, too. Let time and light draw; let those marks make themselves.
It is the 21st century after all.
When light becomes visible the object speaks; CLO’s object says craquelure, pattern, shape, hue, abstract, process, minimal, photogram, black swans, light, beauty, non-color, wonder, invention, innovation. This series, for CLO and for us, says:
Finitogram …!
Name: CLO (the) Camera-less Operator
Date: 2025
Title of Artworks: “Finitogram”
Medium: Unique Chemigram
Size: 10″H x 8″W (UF) each; Triptych is 10″H x 24″W (UF)
https://www.ellencareyphotography.com
