Chemigrams.

No camera needed.

A Chemigram as you might imagine, is an image made up by chemical means. An image that exists because of the action of light and developer on an emulsion, but with no projected optical image.

I first got into chemigrams accidentally. I had processed a sheet of 10x8 Ortho film in a tray under red safe light, and after the allotted time, nothing had appeared on the film. In frustration at having wasted a sheet of film, I didn’t bother putting it through stop bath and fix, I just threw it in my test tray. (Behind my fix tray I have a 10x8 tray leaning up against the back wall. When I am doing test strips, I put them in this tray to assess them better. I find that I can’t judge the highlights properly when the test is submerged). This tray gets emptied when there are so many old test strips, they are in danger of falling into the fix. I turned the light on and I was looking for something when I noticed that there was an interesting image appearing on the sheet of film I had just discarded. The emulsion still had traces of developer, and these were running down the film as it became exposed by the room lighting. I thought it looked really interesting, so I put it in the fix to preserve it, washed and dried it. This is the sheet of film;

and this is a contact print from it;

After this, I became more open to the possibilities of accidental images, so I experimented with having a piece of film out in the light and splashing developer onto it.

Although this was interesting, it wasn’t accidental. There were parts of it that were too deliberate. I exposed another sheet of film but didn’t develop it. I then left it in the test tray with lots of bits of fix-soaked paper. The fix removed the image from some areas and the rest was brought up in some used paper developer, then re fixed.

When printed on a high contrast paper, the image worked much better;

I thought that there might be other ways to create these random, abstract images, so I tried a few other things. I found a broken piece of glass and poured some old fix onto it, then left it to dry out for a week. This is a contact print from it;

After playing around with this for about a week, I lost interest and didn’t think about it again until another ‘accident’ happened and I got into it again.

I was trying out a very old box of X-Ray film that was 23 years beyond its use by date. I decided to test it by putting an exposed piece in the developer.

I could see the emulsion lifting off and sliding around after about 40 seconds, so I immediately got it out and dried it on a paper towel. I couldn’t fix it or wash it, the emulsion would have slid off the plastic completely.

When it was dry I put it in the enlarger and made a 10x8 print.

When the structure was enlarged, it showed these wonderful stringy shapes.

This next image was part chemical stain/crystalisation and part fogging and uneven development. When it is enlarged it looks like an image from the Hubble Space telescope;

If you look closely you can see a feint image of a knife handle at the bottom. This was the image I was supposed to get from this sheet of film.

I hope some of my readers found this of interest. It is something that can be attempted with very little equipment and the results can be surprising and fascinating.

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Andrew Sanderson September 2025.