A photogram is a type of photograph made without the use of a camera, by exposing photosensitive paper to light, making inanimate objects placed on the paper appear as silhouettes. Daniel Kukla has turned the idea of a photogram on its head by placing things on the paper that emit light themselves: fireflies.
Kukla arrived at this method via his fascination with bioluminescence---light made by a living organism---and the idea of incorporating it into his photography. He ordered a flask of bioluminescent algae through the mail and … nothing. He hit a dead-end. Then one evening, he was jogging in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and literally ran into the solution. “I noticed an abundance of fireflies,” he says. “I caught a few and began to experiment with them every evening with a box of old color photographic paper.”
The work was a two-step process. First, Kukla captures fireflies and releases them onto light-sensitive photo paper in his darkroom. Then he fogs the paper with colored light, creating vibrant hues inspired by nature. Kukla never knows exactly what a photo will look like, which is part of the fun.
“Much of photography is about control,” he says. “Controlling the light, aperture, shutter, framing, etc. This project threw that all out the window brought me back into the darkroom and let the unpredictable nature of these insects create the work.”
The trial and error process of honing the technique invigorated Kukla. He allowed the insects to crawl all over the paper, exploring and interacting with one another as they would in nature. “It is at sunset when the fireflies begin their mating dance," Kukla says. "I wanted the series to be color-saturated and enticing to the eye — much like the flies’ performance and sexual selection.”
While the process is somewhat labor-intensive, the idea is almost too simple to be believed. Fireflies certainly is a case of less is more. “This is my attempt to translate the beauty of this phenomenon in some small way through using a camera-less approach and with the very basics of the medium,” he says.
