Figure 1: Yorgos Loizos, Reflectors with mannequins in darkroom safelight (triptych), c prints; gelatin silver prints; CAD drawing,

2015.
 DES 3 (2) pp. 202–231 Intellect Limited 2013

Design Ecologies
Volume 3 Number 2
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/des.3.2.203_1

YORGOS LOIZOS
University of Greenwich

Chemical darkrooms:
Three architectural design
experiments for surreal
metamorphoses of body
and photography

203
Yorgos Loizos

Abstract analogue
body
chemical photography
Central to my research is the collapse of nature, technology and the human body as a both creative and critical digital architecture
way for speculating architectures of constant change. Photography and film have been essential for recording surrealism
these changes, and in many cases these arts have even allowed to register a world beyond our perception. The
article focuses on Surrealist artist Man Ray and his contemporary artists, photographers and film-makers who
saw the chemical photography’s potential through the alchemic transformation of light and dark throughout
their devices, films and darkroom methods. In parallel the article links with architectural design and theory,
with a series of design experiments through chemical photographic and analogue processes, to challenge and
re-inspire a more contemporary digital architecture. This article will investigate chemical photography of its
variable density and indices as a new form of constructing architectures. How the wet process of chemical
photography could advance in such a way that could become architectural, and by exploring the light and
temperature sensitive aspect of space, will evoke its constant transmutation and openness to chance.

Introduction: Body condenses on photographic paper

This article is a part of a research project by architectural design. It focuses on chemical photographic
process as a way to inform contemporary architectural design. It frames the photographed body to be
tagged back to architecture as its core. It looks on how body condenses on photographic paper, and it is
studied throughout a series of design experiments. These design experiments create links between the
works of artists, film-makers and architects, spanning from the late nineteenth century, through the
1920s and 1930s, to the late twentieth century. It eventually asks what the status is of the photographed
body, architecture and chemical photography in the first few decades of the twenty-first century, and
speculates on what is yet to come. Why working in that way – with chemical photography, blending the
analogue chemical and the digital tools together – is contemporary? This is the backbone of the whole
work shown here. It is a quasi-mechanical repetition involving light- and temperature-controlled envi-
ronments, three-dimensional models and surgical cuttings similar to the craft of collage-making.
Sometimes this involves an improvised choreography within the darkness, a time-consuming process,
which is much longer in comparison to the contemporary digital workflow of image-making softwares.
Architects, artists and film-makers speculated about the upcoming digital era during the late half
of the twentieth century. They created myriad iconic fantasies about the body and technology collaps-
ing together with the use of analogue-mechanical tools. Now the reverse is often happening, which is
longing for the almost forgotten analogue tools and spaces, reanimating them through a new kind of
design fantasy. Perhaps it may be partly from nostalgia.

204
 Chemical darkrooms

By the early 2000s digital photography and imagery were used amongst most professionals as the
media to capture reality along with representing architectures. However, as the image is digitalized, its
complex process of making has been lost within the computer’s hardware. The total absence of mate-
rial has created a hollow aesthetic. It now seems that we live in an age that we (architects) seek to
bring back the ‘thinginess’ of things, by leaving the computer behind and bring to surface the actual
making, the constructive involvement, the wetware constructions and the biotechnologies.
This article will illustrate the basic premise of body collapsing into photographic paper, setting the
following questions:

• What is the relationship between the body and photography?

• What is the relationship between photography and architecture?
• Why is the space of photography and architecture same or similar?

It studies the body as it condenses on three different levels, where experimental design work has aimed
to explore: (1) optical, (2) physical, (3) chemical. With this article in each of the previous three levels I
would like to indentify three key eras/ages through history of photography: the glass era/age (1839-late
nineteenth century), the film negative era/age (twentieth century) and the digital era/age (late twentieth
century to present). Each of these three eras/ages introduced a new vision for the photographic prac-
tice: the fixing of the image, reproduction of the image as well as experimental destabilizing of the
image, instant imagery and continuous transformation of the image, respectively.
This article is written through a series of design experimentations, exploring chemical photogra-
phy as a design tool. Central to these experimentations is the tipping point of transformation of the
body into its photographic representation. It further explores the tipping point of a three-dimensional
object/body that becomes a two-dimensional trace and vice versa. Yet this is an ongoing research
through architectural design. The article studies three main aspects of the photographed body to form
links with three different architectural scales: the architectural drawing, an interior of a building with
its architectural components, and the continually changing surrounded cityscape captured in multiple
exposures and recomposed. Each sub-section asks a different question through a design experiment.
The questions, and consequently the design experiments, are then reinformed accordingly by the
previous design studies, and by their results.

Setting the chemical ground: Optical, physical and chemical

Photography and architecture have strong links since photography’s invention. The capture of the
built environment became photography’s one of main subjects during mid-nineteenth century, mainly

205
Yorgos Loizos

due to the slow lenses and chemical emulsion the moment of human motion was hard to be captured.
One example is pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 San Francisco 360° panoramas
and construction sites sequences that captured whole building blocks under construction, over a
period of months. The latter series show how architecture evolves in time. The 360° panoramas show
the bigger picture of the city, which by becoming large prints exhibited in a space, offer a unique
opportunity to an observer to reproject and reemerge himself into the city. Perhaps an early example
of how a body condenses into a picture.
This article studies a link between architecture and photography that is less observed, and which
lies in photographic process. This process involves a physical space – the darkroom – and the direct
manipulation of film, negative, paper with chemicals, temperature. ‘Manipulation’ here is the key,
suggesting the redesigning or reinvention of something already there.

I will argue, however, that the camera obscura and the photographic camera, as assemblages,
practices, and social objects, belong to two fundamentally different organizations of represen-
tation and the observer, as well as of the observer’s relation to the visible. By the beginning of
the nineteenth century the camera obscura is no longer synonymous with the production of
truth and with an observer positioned to see truthfully.
(Crary 1990: 32)

Following Crary, photographic camera was not being always positioned to see ‘truthfully’, perhaps by
framing a part of reality, the photograph becomes a subjective representation. This is where initially
darkroom had been essential for that manipulation of the image of reality in the early days of photog-
raphy. In particular, multiple exposures were used frequently to introduce more dimensions that
condense into the same picture plane. One example is the spirit photography that was very popular
during the nineteenth century.
Darkroom also has been a playground for artful experimentation by giving more space to element
of chance rather than controlled repetition. In darkroom, artists then brought with their own intuition
a process for reinvent and design new realities than representing with precision what is been photo-
graphed. This becomes obvious when one compares photographic experiments in science against
those in art.

Where the photographic experiment in science depends on its replicability and thus on the
demonstration on its control, the photographic experiment in art is quite the opposite. It
gathers authority from the demonstration of chance.
(Wilder 2009: 123)

206
 Chemical darkrooms

Focusing on Surrealists, artists, who saw the chemical photography’s potential through the alchemic
transformation of light and dark throughout their devices, films and darkroom methods, made the
human body or its replications protagonist to their work. In particular Man Ray’s work is important to
my own research. A painter and a photographer, Man Ray initially used photography to document his
paintings and sculptures. By the early 1920s he reinvented the camera as an instrument to explore
desires, dreams and strange spacescapes. He rediscovered the photogram – the action of light through
an object set directly on a photographic paper (named them rayographs after his name ‘Ray’) – and
solarization – the accidental re-exposure of a film plate into sudden light. These experimentations
would not be discovered if there was not a specialized architectural scenario: the d
­ arkroom.
The time between 1920s and 1930s are important for my research and practice. Experimental
photography brought newly undiscovered grounds, not only beautiful compositions, but challenged
the essence of photography: destabilize the final image with a variety of chemical darkroom tactics.
Yet during that time, the integration of chemical photography into architecture is not obvious from
these artists and designers, with the exceptions perhaps of Frederick Kiesler (e.g. Endless Theatre) in
architecture, and Moholy-Nagy (e.g. Institute of design) in product designs. Through my own design
practice I find inspiration at that particular era. However, with my work I would also like to challenge
its potential design experimentation further, filtered by today’s context and technologies.

1. Optical: Scanning topographies of the body

The direct application of an object on photographic paper created early scanned objects into two-
dimensional forms with the flash of a light source. During the 1920s and 1930s Dada artists and
Surrealists mastered this effect in a series of darkroom experiments where everyday objects
recomposed in dreamy landscapes.
Collage techniques of that era were eventually being reapplied in the photograms series. Surgical
micro-movements capture the choreography of the various objects. Yet there is one fundamental
difference between the collage and the photogram: while at collage surgically cut paper is placed
directly on paper, creating topography of different paper heights in the final piece, in photogram, the
collaged objects are imprinted, or condensed (flattened) within a single layer surface.

Darkroom processes like combination printing and double exposure were preferred to scis-
sors and paste. For these techniques could preserve the seamless surface of the final print
and thus reinforce the sense that this image, being a photograph, documents the reality from
which it is a transfer.
(Krauss 1985a: 28)

207
Yorgos Loizos

Figure 2: Yorgos Loizos, Scanning topographies of the body #1 (After Man Ray paper spiral, CD 1922), CAD drawing, 2015.

208
 Chemical darkrooms

Figure 3: Yorgos Loizos, Scanning topographies of the body #2 (After Man Ray CD 1922), CAD drawing, 2015.

209
Yorgos Loizos

When creating camera-less images (photograms), the first observation of the process is what involves
a direct photochemical action, which can have a significant effect to the final result. The final image
production is interlinked with the duration of exposure, chemicals’ temperature, distance and angle of
object from the photographic paper, and any improvised actions, such as distortion of negative or
picture plane or both, violent light source. The trace of actual/physical objects that masked various
areas of the paper is casted directed on the light-sensitive surface as a negative-positive. Another
observation is that through different time exposures, and moving the object over different parts of the
photographic paper, carefully covering certain parts of the paper, the object rendered multiple times,
almost like dancing or rotating across the paper.
All these above observations have an important input on the way I would be working through the
architectural drawing, exchanging ideas between these two media. Photographic drawings in that
sense could challenge architectural drawings of being static, not communicating time and duration, or
being overly sharp, not communicating the variation of distances between the various dimension that
condense altogether. As a result I started documenting a series of Man Ray’s rayographs as a form of
annotating drawings analysing possible light conditions, distances, time-duration and speculating on
the variety of objects used. To be more exact, I focused on his early experiments during 1921–1922;
twelve of these rayographs are the Champs Délicieux/Field of Delight. These drawings showing over-
views of objects, and possible elevations and oblique views, were initially hand-traced, then scanned,
then digitally traced, partly annotating quasi-real and fantastic possibilities for Man Ray’s rayographs,
linking them back to a context – a Parisian Hotel room. The drawings then are attached to my own
photograms/diagrams of designed objects for a house/darkroom, to create further links of two differ-
ent worlds together, one located in Paris in early 1920s and the other in 2010s London. In all the draw-
ings the body is then embedded as a re-exposure and connecting it to the photograms topographies.
Another accidental discovery of Man Ray and his then assistant Lee Miller were the solarizations
(photographs Lee Miller’s solarized body). Throughout the development of these design experiment,
several quick exercises were linked to study the action of flashing the film or photographic paper with
light for less than a second during chemical processing or development. Darker areas become lighter,
and thus the final images are a hybrid of positive and negative, through an ‘optical corrosion’ (Kraus
1985b). Models such as Lee Miller on some of Man Ray’s photographs covered part of their bodies
with dark fabrics, or were projected with strong studio light to cast distinct dark shadows over their
bodies, photographed in front of a dark background and resulted to images showing parts of their
bodies melting in space.
As the body dissolves into the surrounded space, we can think of design of specialized body
outfits and specialized outfits, and look back to the work of the French physiologist Etienne-Jules
Marey. On his black outfits there were drawn white lines across the arms, torso and legs, annotating
key body junctions, joints. In that way, the users/models while wearing them against a black backdrop

210
 Chemical darkrooms

(Etienne-Jules Marey’s Dark Hangars, c.1880s), photographing them the body on black outfit would
dissolve in the black background only to make visible the key white lines. This was an early scanning
of the user’s body daily activities. ‘A figure jumping off a stair’ is one photograph from a series of
chrono-photographic studies. The photograph then would ultimately be read as a time-based body
drawing. These iconic photographic drawings create a sequence of precise lines and vertices to partic-
ular point of the body.
In 1981 science fiction film Looker, by Crichton, a research centre has manufactured a powerful
computer that can scan topographies of the body to create digital mannequins. During scanning, a
grid of crosses similar to CAD packages was projected onto the body, picking up the body topogra-
phies. This was an early cinematic speculation of digital three-dimensional scan. The software accord-
ing to film created flawless digital doubles to be used in TV advertisements. No distortion is allowed
to the contrary Surrealist aspect where dissolving into curbed surfaces produced new possibilities for
capturing the body.
The Surrealist distortion studied in the work of André Kertesz is another form of optical dissolving
of the body on photographic film and paper. André Kertesz studies the body through distortion,
mirrors and architectural scenarios located in Halls of Mirrors. ‘The doubling of the mirror’ (Krauss
1985a: 31) brings back the lost fluidity of the sterile photographed body, and makes us aware of
body’s constant flux, in comparison to the static modern body.
Looking at Man Ray’s series of photographs entitled ‘Anatomies’, these out-of-focus photographs
are ‘defamiliarizing the human body’ (Krauss 1985b: 60). During the photograms design experiments
one initial observation was that while the object becomes extremely sharp once touched the paper, it
softly rendered out-of-focus when it distance itself defamiliarizing the once sharp known object. Body
horror films during the 1980s explored explicitly through mainly analogue visual effects the possibili-
ties of physical and electronic frontiers of becoming blurred. These almost visceral filmic experiments
de-familiarized the body at its most extreme. In contrast to Man Ray’s out-of-focus photographed
bodies, these simulated sharp chemical manipulations of the body affected to the new hybrid of elec-
tronic and chemical age, pharmacology, television, surgery, all dissolved on film negative through the
cinematic lens.
In David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), the body partly dissolves through the Cathode Ray
tube screen, quasi-physically inserted on the TV screen. The televised images would first trans-
form the main character Max Rehn (James Woods) mind, to later transform his physical body – a
common theme to most of Cronenberg’s 1980s films that studied the possible transformation of
the body through technology at its most extreme extend.
I would like to think that the drawings of the design experiment showed in this section can be
read as a detective’s line of enquiry, navigating through a series of clues, objects, spaces that are
revealing their three dimensions plus time, and then suddenly collapse back to two dimensions of the

211
Yorgos Loizos

drawing. Like in previous drawings, I reapply a grid as a device to focus, or seek for more clarity. ‘The
grid was also a familiar artist’s device to enlarge or transfer drawings […]’ (Solnit 2003: 195). The grid
suggests in addition is known to photographers, using it in their camera to frame their composition.
In an iconic sequence of Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott in 1982, Deckard (Harrison Ford) elec-
tronically navigates through a photograph, found in the apartment of one of his suspect replicants
Leo, questioning the very essence of perception: is it a three-dimensional space? Is it a two-dimensional
photograph?

Deckard issues commands like a film director (‘Track right … Now pull back …’) and the
frozen moment of the photograph is granted a new temporality. A grid is overlaid on this
field and measured coordinates regulate and guide the detective’s movement across the ter-
rain of externalized memory.
(Bukatman 1997: 46–47)

2. Physical: Dusk till dawn soft furniture

‘Our furniture constitutes an external constellation of your skin areas and body postures’
(Ballard 1992) an epidermis, a body imprint, studied as moulds or body uniforms.
Future bionic hybrids will be more confusing, more pervasive, and more powerful. Imagine
there might be a world of mutating buildings, living in silicon polymers, software programs
evolving offline, adaptable cars, rooms stuffed with coevolutionary furniture, gnabnots for
cleaning, manufactured biological viruses that cure your illnesses, neural jacks, cyborgian
body parts, designer food crops, simulated personalities, and a vast ecology of computing
devices in constant flux.
(Kelly 1994: 607)

This section studies the transformation of photogram masks into a three-dimensional object as part of
a design process. Photograms are non-contextual images, rendered always on a dark backdrop. In
some examples though, photograms were made by exposing objects of the exact space of the process,
tagging bits of the context back to the frame or drawing. In particular, through Man Ray’s rayographs,
everyday objects of his hotel, darkroom, studio and the human body transform into traces of artful
compositions. ‘Taking whatever objects came to hand; my hotel-room key, a hand kerchief, some
pencils, a brush, a candle, a piece of twine’ (Man Ray 1963: 129). These new two-dimensional draw-
ings reveal objects of an uncertain state of purpose. This transformation of everyday physical objects

212
 Chemical darkrooms

Figure 4: Yorgos Loizos, Reflector 3/9 with mannequin, gelatin silver print, 2013. Figure 5: Yorgos Loizos, Reflector 1/9 with mannequin, gelatin silver print, 2013.

213
Yorgos Loizos

Figure 6: Yorgos Loizos, Reflector 1/9 (elevation), gelatin silver print; CAD drawing, 2015.

214
 Chemical darkrooms

Figure 7: Yorgos Loizos, Reflectors (in motion), gelatin silver print, 2013.

215
Yorgos Loizos

Figure 8: Yorgos Loizos, Reflector 4/9 orbiting (time-based photogram), gelatin silver print; CAD drawing, 2015.

216
 Chemical darkrooms

Figure 9: Yorgos Loizos, Street view with Reflectors (in motion), gelatin silver prints; CAD drawing, 2015.

217
Yorgos Loizos

into traces and diagrams embeds the casted tone graduation of the physical objects bathed in light for
a few seconds. This process has a direct link to the blue prints and the architectural drawings, such as
overview plans and elevations, depending on which way the objects were placed on paper. The rayo-
graphs are becoming the masks for new compositions, extruded into three-dimensional objects.
Early designs of this project followed the surrealist motif of spiral for the objects’ shapes, their
position, their spinning movement and correlation to each other in a continuous fluidity. Spiral is
subject of many of surrealist artists including photographer Man Ray experimentations, ‘a symbol of
cyclical continuity’ (Baldwin 1988: 98). Man Ray writes in his autobiography that the spiral was
amongst the three-dimensional shapes used for his cameraless rayographs: ‘I made cones and trian-
gles, and wire spirals, all of which produce astonishing results’ (Man Ray 1963: 129). The project is
linked to Man Ray’s rayographs, and other darkroom experiments, initially entitled as ‘Man Ray’s
darkroom’ I would like to explore it as vehicle to introduce chemical photographic darkroom to more
active architectural scenarios, and in particular to the domestic environment, whether this is urban or
suburban it still needs to be decided.
There are nine of these architectural elements/soft furniture, each revealing a twofold use, during
(day) light–(night) dark configuration throughout 24 hours: (1) desk-light box, (2) rear window blinds,
(3) illuminator-flashgun, (4) scanners-reflectors, (5) anemometers/hydrometers-chemical agitators,
(6) sundial-light metre, (7) breezeway-ventilation, (8) bath tub-wet chemical tank and (9) clock-timer.
As Man Ray could only use his early darkroom during the dark hours, from dusk till dawn, these
furniture are thought to become more agitated and vivid during that same time. While in day time
their day configuration blends to the domestic environment.
This project is part of an architectural fantasy, partly tested, and partly speculative. The soft furni-
ture readjust and reconfigure themselves, as body moulds them. They are sensitive to environmental
conditions like light, air, temperature, humidity, electromagnetic waves of electronic devices, but also
inextricably linked to the domestic situations of the everyday. They are part primitive part high-tech,
part analogue part digital, hybrids of the digital age.
Dusk till dawn soft furniture project follows the tradition of requestioning and reinventing of the
domestic condition through the technology and the ongoing change of the body by a number of
architects and designers in the late twentieth century, such as Ben Nicholson’s Appliance House, Mark
West’s Safehouse and Project Atlas (with Natalija Subotincic). Mark West describes his early 1980s
Safehouse project as ‘entirely sealed; it had no entry or exit. Its windows were inward-facing TV moni-
tors displaying video feeds from outside and/or inside …’ (West 2012: 219).
Here I would like to discuss more the reflectors. Reflectors, ubiquitous to photographic studios,
here are speculated as domestic version of weather instruments, measuring and deflecting natural
light during daytime and artificial light during night. The reflectors also deflect light into any user of
the room, as well as scanning user’s body following its movements in space. They are sensitive to

218
 Chemical darkrooms

temperature, air currents disturbances – like anemometers – instruments for constant atmospheric
surveillance. Looking back at the work by chronophotographer Etienne-Jules Marey: ‘Similarly
equipped instruments were also used in physiology, the chronophotographer Marey having designed
a number of such apparatuses’ (Henderson 1998: 155). My reflectors are linked to these late nineteenth-
century instruments, but filtered through the work of Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, who often
collaborated and were inspired by the work of Etienne-Jules Marey.
Moholy-Nagy in his ‘New Vision’ is bringing together photography, along sculpture, motion
pictures and painting to its industrial and scientific potential. His ‘Vision in motion’ shows various
design experimentation through darkroom photography (e.g. photograms), light installations. ‘It
called for the appreciation of the formal visual aspects of scientific photographs and for the use of
scientific technologies like x-rays and photograms to make art photographs’ (Wilder 2009: 107–08).
The act of chance through the making of darkroom photographs is equally important to the careful
preparation. This is an important potential to explore in architectural design, and to reintroduce the
accidental and the non-prescribed.

3. Chemical: Visual density of ultra-sensitive photographic layering

The screen may be dissolved (Friedberg 2006: 244).
This section studies the chemical process of photographic exposure and development, and seeks
analogies with the architectural design process. Here the design experiment explores the rich and
often uncertain process of photographic layering in relation to architectural drawing layering. Using
multi-layered transparencies, bringing together the composites of a film and looking at how surrealist
techniques of double/multiple exposure, temperature manipulation, refraction, reflection and interfer-
ence, cinematic juxtaposition become vital tools for architectural design.
The visual density design experiment focuses mainly on the chemical photographic process, and
challenges the architectural design of the space where the whole process is contained. It is interlinked
with the previous soft-furniture design experiments. An additional soft-furniture part of the architec-
tural elements discussed in the previous section is the bathtub/chemical agitator. The process of
mixing and testing the chemicals in various temperatures and lights conditions influences the design
of this object. Perhaps equally this section studies the spatial ecology of the photographic process,
consisting of the choreography of objects, vessels for liquids, light modulators, architectural elements
and atmospheric conditions that affect the process.
My focus here begins from the moving ‘dark wagons’ of Muybridge of his photographic discovery
of American West. The dark wagons were improvised mobile spaces where chemical process could
take place. Due to their improvisation, and often not controlled environmental conditions such as

219
Yorgos Loizos

Figure 10: Yorgos Loizos, Visual Density, chemical field (mannequin with chemical mixer), c print, 2014.

220
 Chemical darkrooms

Figure 11: Yorgos Loizos, Visual Density, chemical basins/bathtubs (15 generations of digital model multiple exposures to provide temperature variations), CAD drawing,
2015.

221
Yorgos Loizos

Figure 12: Yorgos Loizos, Visual Density, Wet Baths (Maria): Basin 1/3 with craters and rilles (plan distorted), c print; CAD drawing, 2015.

222
 Chemical darkrooms

Figure 13: Yorgos Loizos, Visual Density, Basins with craters and rilles (showing traces of photographic chemicals inside a continually evolving darkroom/house topography), CAD drawing, 2015.

223
Yorgos Loizos

topography or weather, a number of creative accidents could happen. Rebecca Solnit writes about
these early merging of architectural scenarios and chemical photographic process, in the technological
American west of nineteenth century. ‘[…] photography in Muybridge’s era was such a messy, inex-
act, improvisational, novel, and demanding pursuit that such touches were more than acceptable. The
criteria for truth were also different, or at least the rules of photographic truth had not yet been
compiled’ (Solnit 2010: 186).
The complexity of the process for each of the stages required these pioneer photographers to
create pockets of spaces with different environmental conditions, such as light and temperature, to
accommodate each of the processing stages. Although the design of the space was second to its prac-
ticality, spaces such as the Eadweard Muybridge’s dark wagons, Etienne-Jules Marey’s dark hangars
and Thomas Alva Edison’s Black Maria create some exciting architectural scenarios. These scenarios
simulate light and dark, measure the human body and control their own atmospheric conditions. Yet
these spaces were created to capture a photograph or photographic sequence, giving less space to
chance and creative accidents. However, small errors at any stage of the process were still possible
and could affect the final print dramatically. What happens to an architecture scenario when the
element of chance is the creative driver?
Technological background, which includes chemical photography experimentation, of Marcel
Duchamp Large Glass, according to Linda Dalrymple Henderson:

In this fluid realm of Playful Physics, chemistry and technology, Duchamp freely layered mean-
ing over meaning, moving readily from fairground to science laboratory to mythic realms.
(Henderson 1998: 89)

Adding that: ‘Once Duchamp’s planning for the Large Glass has begun, however, his growing interest
in photographic processes and the use of sensitive plates as registering instruments, in conjunction
with Kupka’s developing theories, dictated a new approach’ (Henderson 1998: 111).
It would be by the mid-1920s that experimenting directly with photochemical processes could be
a fantastic field for new visual possibilities. Key surrealists saw ‘photography openness to chance’
(Krauss 1985b: 82). The film negative itself is a space of experimentation, studying the very nature of
photography, a direct exposure, re-exposure, mirrored double, and chemical and optical manipula-
tions. Surrealist artists such as Maurice Tabard and Raoul Ubac, who were associated with Man Ray,
explored the film negative as an endless playground of experimentations embracing uncertainty and
chance. Tabard composed his images doubling and mirroring the body. Ubac revealed body collages,
manipulated by heating or boiling the film negative to buckling. ‘[…] he [Ubac] often explored the
technical infrastructure of the photographic process, submitting the image of the body to assaults of a
chemical and optical kind’ (Krauss 1985b: 65).

224
 Chemical darkrooms

Visual density is very much based on the manipulation of film negative and photographic plates
exposed in different conditions. Some of the experimentations were aimed to produce a study of self-
forming of exposed photographic chemicals or ink colours directly on the plate. Yet this design exper-
iment is a hybrid of rough forms and more refined photographic drawings. Many of the photographic
plates are documentations of the previous project furniture, and the body, such as mannequin bodies
from shop windows. The plates are then recomposed as series of collages to connect visual elements
together in multiple exposures. This is a continuous process, which I use to create new vistas for the
house/darkroom, now to be located back in London.
In the work of architect Peter Eisenman, Moving Arrows, Eros and Other Errors (1985), drawings
transparencies were layered and rearticulated by the viewer, suggesting new promise for virtually
inhabiting distinct spaces simultaneously in Verona. The fresh layering of the drawings discontinued
places that were physically bound, creating new stories in variety of scales. ‘In effect it was a palimps-
est of fictions that could be read as a virtual memory theory evoking a fictional past. […] A not truthful
architecture that recognized discontinuity’ (Spiller 2006: 158).
In visual density drawing patterns, tools and furniture from the previous projects are now framed
back to our attention within a series of montages and juxtapositions. As the screens dissolve together,
visual density is about an architecture that longs for the element of chance, quasi-magical and quasi-
primitive photochemical constructions.
At the time of experimentations of Tabard, Ubac and Man Ray, double exposure and juxtaposi-
tion were appearing in cinema too. Films such as Abel Gance’s La Roue (Gance 1923) connected
strong visual elements such as body, eye motif and the city, by producing some scenes with extremely
quick montage of frames, resulting in some scenes to last only one frame, far too fast for the human
eye to register. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (Lang 1927) captured the fast-moving motion of the cityscape
through juxtaposition and double exposure, with a sequence of the eye motif that may be associated
with Surrealism. Films like Metropolis happened in the very early days of cinema. Their visual effects
brought together fantastic optical trickery with glorious model-making. One of the last films to be
shot in a similar fashion, blending in-camera effects with astonishing models and photography, was
Blade Runner (Scott 1982). Noted in its behind-the-scenes documentary Dangerous Days: Making
Blade Runner (Lauzirika 2007) was one of the very last films to be filmed in that way. The film
presented a sad but rich vision throughout a visual layering of analogue negative-film composites
dissolved and filtered in thick photochemical fog. ‘The brilliance of Blade Runner, like Alien before it,
is located in its visual density. Scott’s “layering” effect produces an inexhaustible complexity, an
infinity of surfaces to be encountered and explored’ (Bukatman 1997: 8).
Blade Runner ‘Hades landscape’: physical models, acid photo-etchings replicated and projected in
an angle (the exact camera coverage angle) to create the illusion of depth. The filming technique used
performed a series of multiple exposures in the same roll of film over and over to produce a complex

225
Yorgos Loizos

Figure 14: Yorgos Loizos, Light reflectors orbit picture plane (motion studies), c prints, 2014.

226
Chemical darkrooms

227
Yorgos Loizos

visual layer of the city, flames, illuminated hover cars, lightning, atmospheric haze, all at once to
compose one of the most iconic opening scenes in cinema. This was a slow and elaborate process,
which often provided of accidental re-exposures and juxtaposition of wrong frames. ‘Blade Runner’s
elaborate “mise-en-scène” and probing cameras create a tension that is fundamental to a period of
inexorably advancing technological state’ (Bukatman 1997: 12).
From the two-dimensional etched drawings we land into a rich and complex three-dimensional
model. The analogue camera then gives the opportunity of navigation and transition through this rich
landscape. In both the opening sequences of Blade Runner and visual density, design experiments are
led by the in-camera effects as well as potential creative mistakes. Yet the new digital era suggests
more than ever the alchemic art of transformation, and navigation through spaces impossible to access
with analogue media. ‘If mechanical cinema is the art of transition, electronic cinema is the art of
transformation’ (Youngblood 2003: 157). Still analogue in cinema, photography and architecture
keeps an important position, and instead to be forgotten there is an opportunity to be enhanced.

Conclusion: Motion studies and beyond

All three design projects mentioned in the article are part speculative and part based on ongoing tests
and experimentations. All seek relations between architecture and the process of photography, the
analogue and the digital, the human body and the worlds it inhabits. There is always an enjoyment of
creating something such as a hand drawing, a designed object or a chemical photograph through
analogue means, then testing it to real environments and conditions, and to the sudden moment of a
happy accident. This experience should be one to bring back to the digital age and suggest an alterna-
tive to immaculate designs and products. Camera and photograph likely reveal the world truthfully.
Altering the process of the photograph can generate new and exciting worlds, not truthful, as taught to
us by the surrealist artists, yet truly fascinating. The ongoing state of the three projects – experiments
gave space to study these constructed objects and architectures in time, and seeing the world they
begin to build in motion. Here is another tipping point, of the static drawing or imagery that is about
to become a cinematic one. I began to combine a series of photograms from Dusk till dawn furniture
together to experiment with the illusion of movement, and study the object from different orthogonal
point of views almost simultaneously. It is a version of animated drawing on its very early stages, thus
its future is not yet known. But looking at David Lynch’s early work Six men getting sick, it displays the
magical and surreal potential of the animated drawing. Lynch’s animated drawing shows slippages of
body transformation, which are strongly linked to Francis Bacon body triptychs. Filming of how a
painting with its annotations, drawings and etched physical models are manipulated over a period of
time. The film negative was then cut and pasted in six repetitive loops. A hybrid between drawing and

228
 Chemical darkrooms

motion photography, the animated drawing is a key medium to be further explored. It may also be
associated with the relatively more recent digital technique of slit-scan, which brings new relations
between time and photographed bodies in space. Motion studies and animated drawings will be serv-
ing the three design projects and the story that was written through this article. These studies are
closely interlinked, and may become an exciting way to document or speculate of unexpected meta-
morphoses in the chemical photography and its architectural scenarios. With darkroom’s flickering
light and its dark spaces, the tipping points of the unexpected changes form a wondrous world for the
body to reinhabit, and to be dissolved on chemical photography’s unstable states.

References

Baldwin, Neil (1988), Man Ray, American Artist, New York: Da Capo Press.
Ballard, J. G. (1992), ‘Project for a glossary of the twentieth century’, in Jonathan Crary and
Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, Zone series 6, New York, NY and Cambridge, MA:
Zone; Distributed by the MIT Press, pp. 268–79.
Braun, Marta and Brookman, Philip (2010), Eadweard Muybridge 1830–1904, London: Tate Publishing.
Bukatman, Scott (1997), Blade Runner, London: British Film Institute.
Crary, Jonathan (1990), Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth
Century, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Crichton, Michael (1981), Looker, USA: Warner Bros.
Cronenberg, David (1983), Videodrome, Canada and USA: Universal Studios.
Friedberg, Anne (2006), The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gance, Abel (1923), La Roue, France: Films Abel Gance.
Henderson, Linda Dalrymple (1998), Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large
Glass and Related Works, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kelly, Kevin (1994), Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, London: Fourth Estate.
Krauss, Rosalind (1985a), ‘Photography in the service of surrealism’, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane
Livingston (eds), L’amour fou: Photography and Surrealism, Washington, DC and New York:
Corcoran Gallery of Art; Abbeville Press, pp. 15–42.
—— (1985b), ‘Corpus delicti’, in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston (eds), L’amour fou:
Photography and Surrealism, Washington, DC and New York: Corcoran Gavllery of Art;
Abbeville Press, pp. 57–100.

229
Yorgos Loizos

Lang, Fritz (1927), Metropolis, Germany: Universum Film (UFA).

Lauzirika, Charles de (2007), Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner, USA: Blade Runner
Partnership; Lauzirika Motion Picture Company; Warner Home Video.
Lynch, David (1967), Six Men Getting Sick, USA: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Man Ray (1963), Self-Portrait, London: Penguin.
Moholy-Nagy, László (1947), Vision in Motion, Chicago: Paul Theobald.
Nicholson, Ben (1990), Appliance House, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Scott, Ridley (1982), Blade Runner, USA: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Solnit, Rebecca (2003), Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge, London: Bloomsbury.
—— (2010), ‘Tangles, time, solitude, transformation: Continuities in Eadweard Muybridge’s
river of images’, in Marta Braun and Philip Brookman (eds), Eadweard Muybridge 1830–1904,
London: Tate Publishing, pp. 177–88.
Spiller, Neil (2006), Visionary Architecture; Blueprints of the Modern Imagination, London: Thames &
Hudson.
West, Mark (2012), ‘Out of our hands: Three architectural fantasies for strange and sad ecologies’,
Design Ecologies, 2: 2, pp. 214–35.
Wilder, Kelley (2009), Photography and Science, London: Reaktion.
Youngblood, Gene (2003), ‘Cinema and the code’, in Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (eds), Future
Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film, Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, pp. 156–61.

Suggested citation

Loizos, Y. (2013), ‘Chemical darkrooms: Three architectural design experiments for surreal
metamorphoses of body and photography’, Design Ecologies, 3: 2, pp. 202–231, doi: 10.1386/
des.3.2.203_1

Contributors details

Yorgos Loizos is a designer and photographer. He received a Masters in Architecture with Distinction
from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, in 2009 and previously studied at École Spéciale
d’Architecture and the Edinburgh College of Art. His work has been shown in London, Paris,
Edinburgh and Athens. He has taught as a teaching assistant of Sir Peter Cook at the École Spéciale

230
 Chemical darkrooms

d’Architecture and currently teaches at the University of Greenwich and University of Kent. He has
been a visiting critic at the Bartlett UCL and the Architectural Association. Based in London, he
continues to explore contemporary architecture conducting an M.Phil./Ph.D. by Architectural Design
at the University of Greenwich supervised by Professor Neil Spiller and Nic Clear. His research,
supported by the Vice Chancellor’s Scholarship, explores the vital relationship between the analogue
and the digital by looking into chemical photography of its variable density and indices as a form of
architectural design.
E-mail: yorgosloizos@gmail.com
Web address: http://yorgosloizos.com

Yorgos Loizos has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

231