INTERSTICES 11

Seeing in Section: 
The practice of photogrammatic drawing 

Shelley F. Martin 

The photogram as material drawing

The science of photogrammetry accesses the space of photographs for the meas-
urement, translation and production of data about an object or environment that 
has been stilled by a camera, and in doing so indirectly senses its qualities. This 
translation of the photographic image distills multiple reference points to esti-
mate and map the three-dimensional qualities of objects, surfaces, and terrains. 
Just as principles of photogrammetry mine geometric properties from photo-
graphic records and project them as formal gestures, the photogram’s direct 
transposition of a three-dimensional object onto a surface produces a field of 
inquiry rich in spatial consequence by examining light as a tectonic object. Yet 
the photogram does not merely record the object, it also transforms the object.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s initial photographic material practice of recording the 
form of light revealed a surface constructed solely by means of drawing. Mo-
holy-Nagy saw photography as an act that inscribed both tangible and intangible 
qualities of light, surface, profile, and depths. Seeking to “… deal more with the 

Folded Plane. Photogram: Kate Godfrey Folded Light. Photogram: Aubrey Lynch



161

artistic function of expression than with the reproductive function of portrayal” 
(Kostelanetz, 1970: 51), Moholy-Nagy produced the dynamic presence of the im-
age of light as a material engaging a surface. The two-dimensional plane of the 
photograph became a surface record presenting the ability to see light trans-
parently, translucently, opaquely and refractively, thereby changing the state of 
both the light and the object. By actually drawing with light, the photogram, as 
Moholy-Nagy named this production, reveals a continuous presence and shifts 
both drawing and photography to a space in between stasis and motion. 

The examples of such investigations shown here are produced in the setting of 
the architecture studio, an educational construct that initiates the plastic nature 
of design as discovery occurring through autonomy natural to open observa-
tions and practices. The studies engage the presence and physicality of behav-
iours of light arrested by a planar surface, and yield artifacts composed by the 
dynamic spatial relationships of the form and force of light. The artifact’s ability 
to physically produce and make visible what was once invisible in a thing or 
action stands as a lesson for drawing and announces the opportunity for ap-
prehending correspondences between section and material production. As a di-
rect artifact of light, and the interrelationship of an object placed in tension with 
light, the photogram is a materially productive tool that registers, activates and 
transforms both material and phenomenon.

Folded Plane. Photogram: Kate Godfrey Folded Section. Drawing: Katrina Neirgarth



INTERSTICES 11

Re-registration: the frame and photogrammatic space

In 2000, I witnessed a commercial aired on television by Dodge Motors of the 
Dodge Chrysler Group LLC that beautifully presented a new sliding side van 
door feature, and intended to promote its ability to remain open even when 
parked on a downward slope. The commercial was highly organised to convey 
relationships in ways just as in the complex spatial prospect of drawing, and, 
by initiating the multiple depictions of the van in reference to on object seen 
through it, demonstrated the registrations, re-registrations, and inhabitation of 
sectional planes.

An axis through the van was imagined as a crucial origin in establishing given 
relationships, allowing the camera to tightly focus on a goldfish swimming in a 
fishbowl seen through a picture window in a house directly facing and parallel 
to the street on which the van was parked. The van itself was not yet in view; 
only later were the objects through which the axis cut revealed. The fish was 
the fragment that told the story, and as the fish looked happy, it swam in water 
that curiously was not level. In order to present the door feature of the van, the 
ground plane of the frame of reference of the street was recast in an orientation 
parallel to the horizon. By justifying the frame to a level ground plane, the envi-
ronment was re-registered, making the axis of the street level, thereby allowing 
a van with two open heavy side doors to seemingly sit calmly and lightly on a 
horizontal surface. As the camera began to pull back through the window, and 
through the open van doors to the elevation of all the objects in view, we ulti-
mately saw the fundamental axis of the ground plane move and shift to its true 
slope, allowing the water in the fishbowl to seek its own level, and demonstrat-
ing what all the fuss was about: the van doors remained open even if parked on a 
downhill slope. I find the re-framing, extension of reach, depth and breadth, and 
the resultant re-imagining of the frame with respect to the object it presents to be 
the strongest visual demonstration of the facts and experiments of the condition 
of section as sensed and understood in drawing. 

The profiles revealed by section and the space between and around the object of 
study re-situates the total environment and extends the geographic prospect of 
the frame, making it elastic: a line that shuttles and continually moves. Seeing 
section as a mobile figural operation based on the re-organisation of frames is a 
prerequisite for understanding the phenomenon of luminosity as material shape 
and presence.

The sectional records presented in the plates investigate the instrumentality of 
light by moving between the technical and the imaginative states of lines and 
spatial occupation, continually recording, regulating and propagating materi-
al illuminations. The instrumentality of drawing acts as a catalyst and makes 
legible the correspondences of graphic processes of construction and continu-
ally constructs and re-constructs interplay within the picture and the line, the 
gramma and the gramme. As the state of drawing moves between surface and 
frame, it at times hovers or connects between similar and dissimilar inscriptions 
of light, concurrently recognising and retrieving, and imagining and projecting. 
It is in this space that drawing becomes an operation seeking questions as well 
as rules, and at times simultaneously imposes and derives patterns. Both an act 
of recognition and an act of invention, the production of sectional drawings from 



163

transformative photographic space considers the nature and demonstration of 
geometric construction as an act of both contingency and specificity, and within 
a rarefied space of drawing makes shape palpable prior to construction. 

The surface: “seeing-in” the vessel of drawing

Drawing sectionally through photogrammatic space produces an environment 
that does not attempt to verify the preceding object’s original or transformed 
material dimensions or qualities; instead it seeks to re-recognise material form 
and potential. Each mark is wholly three-dimensional in its spatial occupation of 
the plane of the page, and it directly deals with the thickness of shape. Shape is 
revealed as more than a perimeter, and becomes a surface that can be occupied. 
A new space of drawing is made where light records the consequence of section-
al space prior to material existence. The space is a relic of light. Richard Wollheim 
recognises this activity as a perceptual state, and imbues this “simultaneous at-
tention” (Wollheim 1980: 213) with the ability to perceive object and medium.

Seeing in is a natural capacity we have – it precedes pictures, though 
pictures foster it – which allows us when confronted by certain differ-
entiated surfaces, to have experiences that have a dual aspect, or ‘two-
foldedness’: so that, on the one hand, we are aware of the differentia-
tion of the surface, and, on the other hand, we observe something in 
front of, or behind, something else. (Wollheim 1993: 188)

Drawing is a vessel for both veridical and non-veridical modes of thought, vision 
and material inquiry. Moving between Wollheim’s “seeing-in”, or representation-
al seeing of relevant three-dimensional aspects in a surface, and a type of non-
veridical imaginative resurrection of what already may exist, the photogram, 
considered as a basis for drawing, understands the sectional projective action. 
In this photographic space, drawing studies the transformation of the original 

Frame. Drawing: Kate Godfrey Surface. Drawing: Kate Godfrey



INTERSTICES 11

object, and seeks to materially express both interior and exterior, volume and 
profile, and to engage the construction of drawings as fields of inquiry. The pho-
tographic works are a totality of layers, and like the layering practice of Sinopia, 
a pigment applied before the final painting of the fresco, the under-drawings are 
initial markings that become a part of the deep surface of the work.

Investigative works produced within the educational setting, these drawings are 
made with light and graphite, and propose that there are laws found in the acts 
of forming and the acts of seeing which create new knowledge. Drawing exists 
in an emergent condition activated by its own means, where the nature and dem-
onstration of form-making determine each drawing’s existence, and behaviours 
both specific and contingent to production manifest an ability for a drawing to 
build a particular presence. The recognition of movement within the plane, den-
sity and dynamism found through material means, celebration of the internal 
logic of a given material, and the ability of matter to receive and express transfor-
mation through action were ideas developed by Theo van Doesburg in the forms, 
inquiries, and works he termed Plasticism.

The material qualities and formal behaviours in these drawings share the funda-
mental tenet of Plastic Art, whose problematically-based practices propose that 
form emerges and is not fixed, having been activated by an origin located solely 
within the work’s own means of production, and by absolute or elemental terms 
that arose directly out of its own being (van Doesburg 1966: 27).

Vessel. Photogram: Patrick Hummel Section. Drawing: Patrick Hummel



165

“Plastic – the sense of existence which a painting achieves.”  

(Rothko, 2004: 43)

The author Walker Percy writes that the essential nature of education should be 
openness (1975: 56-62). This, he believes, is the only condition and environment 
within which true knowledge may develop. Such true discoveries depend upon 
the condition of autonomy, and require an environment predicated on the 
cultivation of the free sovereignty of an individual pursuit. The interrelationship 
of the idea of form and the act of making require that it is more important for a 
work to reveal its own nature rather than revel in received ideas. These means 
of discovery are as critical to the acts of seeing and drawing as they are to 
education.

Seeing in section: drawing as a relic

“ … it is just not true that we see pictures in what they depict; rather, 
we see their depicta in them.” (Schier 1986: 199)

In these works, drawing acts as both a carrier to read consequences through the 
material processes of construction, and a speculative venture that moves the act 
of drawing closer to the form of poetry. Remnants, traces and pieces of light cast 
out new frames and net new unified wholes. These may be definite in relation, 
but temporary in nature, as drawing becomes more like the sensible relics of 

Plasticity. Photogram: Samson Chang Sovereignty. Drawing: Samson Chang



INTERSTICES 11

light’s activity through a surface, a surface whose intangible content is recognis-
able through traces of form, imagery, and the spirit of material imagination.

References

Kostelanetz, R. (Ed.). (1970). Moholy–Nagy: An Anthology. New York: Da Capo Press. 

Percy, W. (1975). Message in a Bottle. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Rothko, M. (2004). The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Schier, F. (1986). Deeper Into Pictures. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press. 

Van Doesburg, T. (1966). Principles of Neo-Plastic Art. New York: New York Graphic Society.

Wollheim, R. (1980). Art and Its Objects. Cambridge (UK): Cambridge University Press.

Wollheim, R. (1993). The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.

Relic of Light. Photogram: Lisa Cox