![](\"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/blogpix\/celestograph.jpg\" "\\"August")
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Few outside of Sweden know<\/a> that the playwright August Strindberg had periods of intense engagement with painting and photography in the 1890s, when his literary creativity had reached a deadlock. In an essay from 1894 called “Chance in Artistic Creation,” he describes the methods that he employs, speaking about his wish to “imitate [\u2026] nature’s way of creating.”* … <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nStrindberg distrusted camera lenses, since he considered them to give a distorted representation of reality. Over the years he built several simple lens-less cameras made from cigar boxes or similar containers with a cardboard front in which he had used a needle to prick a minute hole. But the celestographs were produced by an even more direct method using neither lens nor camera. The experiments involved quite simply placing his photographic plates on a window sill or perhaps directly on the ground (sometimes, he tells us, already lying in the developing bath) and letting them be exposed to the starry sky. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
More about Strindberg’s Celestographs can be found at Cabinet<\/a>, along with a translation of “On Chance in Artistic Creation<\/a>“. (Found via greg.org<\/a>.)<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.cookylamoo.com\/boringlikeadrill\/blogpix\/Cage11stones.jpg\" "\\"John")
* A quote remarkably similar to John Cage’s “The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation,” a thought to which he returned throughout his later life.