Return of the Lauragram
I´m starting this one with a little art history lesson for you. Don´t click away yet, it´s not a yawnfest kind of lesson, calm down, but to be able to explain where i´m going with this I first have to explain it´s roots.
One of the grand daddies of Photography, Man Ray (very dead), did something cool and created Rayographs, basically smashing together his name and photograph. These were photograms like the one shown here from 1922 (taken from the MoMA website) where he placed random shit onto photo sensitive paper and exposed it to light. That´s it, that´s the lesson.
Old Ray was a bit of a weirdo but he was on to something here. I´m sure he wasn´t the first to discover making photograms this way but he certainly made it famous.
This method of making photographs struck a cord with me when learning about art history at college and so that is how my own Lauragrams were born. I didn´t go massively deep into this but I gave it a go and found random household crap to make images from. I particularly liked making scenes and seeing what worked and what didn´t. Here are some of my favourites I made. I still have the prints somewhere, there are only one of each so quite rare if I ever become famous and die they´ll be worth a fortune. Best tell the Hobbit where they are just in case!
Fast forward to almost 100 years after that Rayograph of 1922 and I decided to dust off my Lauragram roots and make some “business” cards in the same method. I put the word business in air quotes because I don´t really think i´m using them in the traditional business card sense but for lack of a better word it´s all I have.
It begins with a bag of reels.
Every time I develop a film I´ve been chucking the reel in a little brown bag under the sink. I just can´t bear to throw them away, seems like such a waste and at best I thought I could recycle them at some point. This coming from the same moron who keeps forgetting to save drinks cans but I have managed to collect a bag full of these reels. Baby steps and all that, saving the world one empty photo reel at a time.
Then this year came the printing project I´m working on. I´m not ready to talk about that yet but it´s coming along nicely. Anyway as part of that I was thinking of making some limited or individual unique Lauragrams to go with the project but couldn´t make it fit in my mind. Then a lightbulb went off in my brain and I thought BY JOVE I´VE GOT IT! What if I could combine the bag of festering reels with a Lauragram and make some sort of card to go with the project instead and BOOM the idea was born.
First things first I had to make sure I could actually attach a piece of card or whatever into the reel itself.
Piece of piss! Already cooking with gas here and it looks cool as fuck before it´s even got any words on it (in my humble opinion of course).
Next came a little bit of planning on how I would actually get words to print onto the paper and what to write etc. Prepare yourself for some classic Laura sketches here. I´m quite gifted I think you will agree.
You can basically see how my warped brain works here, believe it or not this all makes perfect sense to me and is basically how I´m thinking most of the time, all arrows pointing to different ideas and questions. The conclusion of this madness was the idea that I could somehow make my own negative with the letters on so I wouldn´t have to map it out every single card I made (because ain´t no one got time for that) but I still wanted some sort of individuality to be able to switch it up between batches. So I went about testing out the negative idea.
For the “negative” part I used the plastic casing that the craft knife I bought for the task came in (getting good at this recycling lark). I have some innards from books that I´m using for something else and thought maybe I could cut out letters from there and use them. Fuck me i´m bad at that! It turns out I´m not particularly supple at precise laser cutting out of tiny letters using a cheap craft knife and no technical skill what so ever. Who would have thunk it? Anyway for the purposes of the test I sweat through it and managed to etch out four simple letters that did the job and stuck them to the plastic with clear tape. As you can see once in the negative carrier (backwards and upside down or whatever way it turned out to be) I had relative success. Or at least the idea was successful in that I could actually make a negative that would be useful for the task of printing a Lauragram although it needed some extreme polishing. For a start I did not want the markings from the tape to be visible and I needed to cut the letters out better. So on to further testing I went.
Further testing proved that I am categorically 100% shit at cutting out letters. Not that I would have become magically expert level at this after the first attempt but I did think in time I´d be passable at it. Denial is indeed not just a river in Egypt.
I also discovered that in order to make the letters fit onto the size of a negative (6x6) then I would have to drop the .com from the end. Fine by me as I´m not just this website, i´m omnipotent so why limit myself eh.
But in terms of this tested piece of shit you see here I can confirm that with or without the .com I needed an intervention on the letters to use. But the basic idea is working at least.
Testing was left alone for a while and some time went by before I picked it up again. Not out of frustration or anything just other stuff (secret stuff) was at the forefront for a while. But the idea was still in the back of my mind although thinking of where to get pre-printed letters from tiny enough to work being the most pressing concern. I didn´t think there would be anywhere in Iceland I´d be able to find them and in honesty I´d not had the brain capacity left aside to think about it so just hadn´t. Then four days before my parents were due to visit at the end of last month it popped back into my brain and thought have a quick google for anywhere in the UK that might sell tiny letters, get them posted to the old folk and they can bring them over, sorted. Which is what I did, lo and behold I found some at a random model boat company in Cornwall and they arrived at my parents house the day they left!
To say these letters were perfect is an understatement. They´re 3mm in size and bloody brilliant for the job. I´d acquired a plastic lanyard holder thingy that I´d planned on putting cut out letters inside but decided to stick the letters to the front of instead, the intention being I´d cut out the single side of plastic, having the other size for spare. I cut a piece of scrap paper to the size of the negative and shoved it in for reference of where to actually stick the letters and got to it.
Holy cow those letters are tiny! It turns out my eyes are not for looking at things this small and I had to put my computer glasses on to even have half a chance of being able to see straight afterwards. They were also ridiculously difficult to get off the chuffing backing paper, not to mention the fecking middle bits in the O´s and A´s etc. All while being bothered by an attention seeking feline and being boiled alive by the uncharacteristically hot weather we´re having in Iceland. I´m melting, the world is fucked, but at least i´ll go down making Lauragrams. As it turns out I would have been able to fit the .com on after all but decided I like the idea of having people google and do some work. After I went half blind sticking the letters on and cut the plastic in two I had another brain wave. Confetti!
As you can see from my incredibly skilled drawings at the start of this I´d planned on incorporating confetti into the Lauragrams. It was one of the elements that I could change between batches of prints to change it up without having to resort to finding different household goods to chuck on there every time. I´d bought a set of different shapes to use and tested with the badly cut out letters earlier so knew they´d work.
So instead of cutting one single sheet of lanyard off I decided to keep the pouch effect and just pour a load of confetti in to shake up and change around when needed. Sealed it up with tape as close to the edge as I could to avoid catching it on the prints and done. Look at it! It´s so pretty!!!!
As it turns out I was a little over enthusiastic with the confetti and had to slice it open and pour some out, twice. No matter how much I shook it around it just wouldn´t clear totally from my letters and it would ruin the overall effect so I admitted defeat there. Also it turned out the little gold fuckers were overwhelming everything else so I had to empty the lot and just put in a little of the others to get it right. All for the art daaaarling!
Time for actual printing time and after shaking my Lauragram “negative” like a crazy person for some time I managed to get all the letters to be free and clear ready for insertion. Admittedly I´d had to slice it open and stick a small straw in once or twice to get the confetti to comply but you get the gist. After some trial and errors I got the timings right and got printing.
I made three batches with different confetti placement in the end but the first batch ended up being the best and most perfectly focussed. I´ll have to watch that next time. No the missing confetti from the bottom left corning doesn´t bother me but yes it does bug the Hobbit, bonus!
After some more time labouring the fact that I can´t cut for shit I had my first batch of finished Lauragram “business” cards and they´re so pretty I could weep. Well not really but they are very pretty and i´m very pleased with them.
For a nice little side by side here is the progression of the idea from start to finish. I like seeing it laid out like this because it shows my brain progression and problem solving. Sounds like I´m selling myself in a job interview but whatever trevor.
They´re not perfect by any means but I think that adds to their charm and i´m sure the later ones will be better as I do more.
Regardless of anything else they are going to be incredibly limited because it´s based on what usable reels I have (turns out there are a select few that are relegated to the recycling plant after all). I counted up 65 reels the other day so should keep me going for a while and I´m adding to that pile all the time. If anything it just feels good to have a use for these reels finally.
I just need to find a use for the “business” cards now…