Untitled (H.B.)

These two prints are photograms, photographic images made without a camera. Liz Deschenes modeled them on a diagram of vision by the exhibition and graphic designer Herbert Bayer, who taught at the influential Bauhaus art school in the early 20th century. Bayer wanted to illustrate the arcs traced by a viewer’s eye. Deschenes’s enlargement of Bayer’s diagram appears to swallow our sight. To make the two prints, she exposed chromogenic (color) paper until it reached a lustrous black. What we see, as a result, includes a ghostly reflection of ourselves.