Untitled (2)

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Alexandre Vitkine

1960

Oscilloscope/Light Photo

Gelatin-Silver Press

Description

Alexander Vitkine made these two untitled oscilloscope photographs in 1960 in the spirit of generative photography—a mode of photographic practice concerned not with documenting the visible world but with producing forms that had no external referent. As he would write in a 1986 article for Leonardo: “My electronic drawings, because they are nonfigurative, are far more original creations, the source of which is only my imagination.”

Trained as an engineer, Vitkine began experimenting with photography in the 1950s and joined “Les 30 × 40,” an influential photographers’ club in Paris. His practice soon divided into two distinct strands: “silhouette photographs” of industrial subjects, printed in stark black and white without gray tones, and what he called “electronic drawings.” The latter were produced by connecting signal generators to oscilloscopes and photographing the resulting patterns on the screen. Over time, Vitkine developed increasingly complex images by combining multiple signals and building more advanced equipment himself. These two oscilloscope works represent an important early phase in Vitkine’s development as a new media pioneer.