Bleeds
Images by Richard Stanley

The images contained in bleeds continue the tradition of lensless photography.  They hark back to the very beginning of photography, 1839, and the work of Henry Fox Talbot and his calotypes—the first positive/negative photographs.  Fox Talbot made calotypes with cameras and lenses, but also by laying flat objects directly onto sensitized paper, exposing the combination in sunlight and processing the result.  He called these images “photogenic drawings”.  Four years later, in 1843, Anna Atkins, using this procedure with the cyanotype process, produced the first book of photographs, British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.  

Modern photographers in the early 20th Century laid three-dimensional objects onto photographic paper and exposed the assemblage using varied light sources.  The resulting black and white monoprints are generally called “photograms”.  Prior to 1920, German artist, Christian Schad, was inspired by Cubism to create photograms, dubbed “schadographs”, by one critic.  Schad’s technique of using discarded objects of all descriptions as source material for his photograms was driven by a Dadaist desire to create art from society’s refuse.  Later, László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray explored Schad’s ideas further.  Ray called his photograms “rayographs”.  In the 1980s, California photographer, Robert Heineken, created a small portfolio of “Recto/Verso” images by laying magazine pages onto Cibachrome paper to produce traditional color photographs of the combined images derived from each side of a page.

For some time, I have marveled at the tertiary images created by viewing printed pages held up to the light.  Most readers find this phenomenon of backlighting a nuisance.  I can’t get enough of it—especially if the source imagery is provocative, the print quality excellent and the paper of high translucence.    Reading a magazine, to me, is to tear it apart, page-by-page—holding each up to the light to discover the nascent, secret image held within—and hidden in plain sight.  The edge of paper is far more interesting torn than cut, and like Schad, I prefer an irregularly-shaped image "to free them," as he explained, "from the convention of the square".  In sum, I prefer fashion magazines for their crisp printing on thin paper; large, arresting images of people and layouts with generous negative space and clean graphics.  Of course, my pages are torn, never cut, and, when possible, presented thus.

--Richard Stanley
Los Angeles, 2009