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Overview
Test strip design is one of Steve Rumsey’s most rigorously modernist photographs. A photogram in which photography is stripped down to its basic elements of light and light-sensitive paper, this work is art of a visual argument that Rumsey was having with pictorialism in the 1950s. Struggling against the pictorialists’ notion that photography could guarantee its status as an art form by aping the effects of painting, Rumsey believed that photography needed to embrace its own specific technological reality, from which an appropriate aesthetic would emerge.
In a sense, Test strip design is a kind of flag-raising exercise — a statement that clearly aligned him with the practitioners of New Photography in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. As Christopher Phillips writes, the New Photographers believed that: ‘The immediate task of the photographer consists in developing a true “language of photography” entirely from within its own range of optical and chemical possibilities.’1 This is exactly what Rumsey argued in ‘The light’, an article published in 1955. In the middle of the twentieth century, he wrote, ‘[T]he artist was presented with a fundamentally different medium … a product of the machine age; an age of science and mass-production’. Photographers, unable to handle this new medium, lost sight of ‘the true nature of the photo-medium’ in favour of pictorialism. The answer, according to Rumsey, came from the medium itself:
‘By accepting the medium as it is, and using it to the full, a truer set of values is being established.’2 Test strip design, created by exposing photographic paper to different amounts of light (white indicating no exposure and black the longest exposure), represents exactly this kind of practice.
One of the criticisms aimed at New Photography was its reliance on a set of updated artistic effects — instead of relying on impressionism, for example, it borrowed from cubism or abstract art. Certainly, Test strip design demonstrates the radical potential of photography to create abstract images that are part of the modernist movement in New Zealand and closely related to developments in painting during the same period.
Damian Skinner
1 Cited in Kennedy Warne, ‘John Johns: Vision of the forest’, New Zealand Geographic, no. 22, April/June 1994, p. 46.
2 Steve Rumsey, ‘The light’, The Developer & Enlarger, vol. 14, no. 2, June 1955, p. 13.
Test strip design (photogram) was created by Steve Rumsey in 1952 and, as the title states, is a photogram rather than a photograph. Test strip design is not the product of a camera, but was created by exposing photographic paper to light for different intervals - black representing maximum exposure and white representing no exposure at all. Using different sized pieces of cardboard, Rumsey has crafted an abstract image from the primary process of photography - the exposure of light-sensitive materials, in this case paper coated with silver halide, which turns metallic silver when light touches it.
Seeing the light
Like many of Rumsey's photographs, Test strip design illustrates his knowledge of, and similarity to, photographers, like Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, who were working in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In his book 'Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings', Christopher Philips writes that Moholy-Nagy argued that photography represented 'a historic mutation in the visual arts, reflecting the fact that "this century belongs to light". The immediate task of the photographer consists in developing a true "language of photography" entirely from within its own range of optical and chemical possibilities.' Many European photographers made photograms because they represented this philosophy taken to the extreme. As 'Test strip design' illustrates, the photogram is nothing other than the result of light and chemicals interacting with each other.
British modernism
Rumsey was given a book on the British abstract artist Ben Nicholson, and 'Test strip design' reveals the impact of Nicholson's work on the photographer. When Rumsey's photograph is compared to a painting like 'Painting (J.L.M.) February 2-47', also in Te Papa's collection, the relationship is clear. Both artists rely on a system of geometric forms, in which planes of colour (or tone in Rumsey's case) sit behind a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines that contrast with the prominent use of circles. The relationship was noticed at the time: during a meeting of the Auckland Camera Club, of which Rumsey was a member, Eric Westbrook, Director of the Auckland City Art Gallery, leaned over and commented to Rumsey that his photographs demonstrated a familiarity with Ben Nicholson's paintings.