Forging New Dramaturgy Tools: Lomogram Image Cards

The recorded message on my partner’s office voice mail prompts callers, if they require immediate assistance, to wait on the line until their call is re-directed to Reception. This recording has become slightly distorted and I was delighted to hear, a few months ago, that if I needed help and stayed on the line, my call would be transferred to “Perception.”

In my dramaturgical practice, particularly in the developmental processes within which I work, perception of and creative response to the prompts and provocations I use are at the core of the practice. I use many type of instigators, as most dramaturgs do, from text fragments, to objects, to sounds. I endeavor to discover and evolve transcultural tools that enable work that emanates from and speaks to communities that are diverse and often disparate. Further, I strive to find ways of transmitting creative outcome as widely as possible. I have found that individual responses to the same dramaturgical prompt encourage discussion about similarity within difference when little-to-no overlap or commonality exists.

Over the last decade, I have been fortunate to work within communities that are geographically distant from my home base of Toronto and culturally distinct from my own ethnicity and experience. In trying to forge ways to work dramaturgically in a diversity of communities, often without benefit of shared language or iconography, my aim has been to create and evolve a set of dramaturgical tools that would work transculturally.

This lead me first to work with The Four Elements, exploring the many different perceptions of air, earth, water, and fire and their interrelationships, given the specifics of time and place and of the landscape within which we were working (Rudakoff). But I also wanted a less intellectual way of working with groups, where a prompt could be offered quickly and creative response could come without the need to “think it through.” I began to evolve this type of prompt through a chance discovery I made when guest teaching at London’s Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2000. A colleague there introduced me to the Russian Lomo Kompact Automat camera, and I began to experiment with how the idiosyncratic and unpredictable photographs (or lomographs) the camera produced could be used as creative tools.

First manufactured in 1983 in Russia, this small, manual camera has a loyal international cult following. Lomographs are part of an art movement that has been growing since 1992, when a group of Viennese students traveling in Prague stumbled on the Lomo Kompakt¹ while looking for an inexpensive camera with which to shoot holiday photographs. When they developed their film and saw that the Lomo had captured peculiar and unexpected images, they founded the Lomographic Society to organize exhibitions and market the camera. The Lomography website² propagates apocryphal stories, such as one claiming that the Kompakt (which is equipped with an automatic shutter that simply stays open until it has enough light for a photograph, no matter how low the light source is) was regularly used by Russia’s KGB to shoot clandestine photographs of transport systems, civil buildings, and military facilities at night, without a flash.

Lomographs tend to be evocative rather than documentative. These are not snapshots that encapsulate a moment for subsequent examination or analysis. They give movement shape and shape movement. Images can appear diffused, distorted, or emanate from an unexpected or warped perspective. Conversely, images can intensify and offer pointed focus on normally insignificant details. Colors, particularly if you cross-process from slide film to color print, are highly saturated. The Lomo Kompakt recognizes the ordinary minutiae of daily life in odd ways. Finally, you do not really look at a Lomograph, but into it. Lomography is characterized, in part, by the extreme degree to which the photographic process is uncontrollable.³

As my experimentation with the Lomo evolved, I became aware of the potential of lomographs to inspire creativity. I realized that the lomograph images encouraged a new and often unexpected way of perceiving known places, things, and even people. To that end, I selected ninety of my lomographs...