Now I love a good digital camera as much as you lot, I even love a black and white film fitted SLR camera as much as many of you probably do, there’s one forgotten photographic technique that has a special place in my heart though. I don’t think that any other type of photography has ever captured the elegance, mystery and just technical majesty of the photogram.

Completely impractical as the photogram is restricted to those with access to a darkroom/enlarger, and those lucky few who can develop their own prints.

A photogram doesn’t need a camera, as they’re created by putting a variety of objects onto the surface of a photo-sensitive material (generally your bog standard photographic printing paper) then exposing it to light before developing it. The results can vary, with the best being breathtaking. It’s all down to the laws of photosensitivity, ya see.

I was introduced to the practice of creating photograms during my very first term as a photography student, as not only did it give us chance to experiment with darkroom techniques, introduce us to the key concepts of Dadaism, but also, more practically, give everyone the chance to buy a camera.

Artistically, the main man of this particular type of image is the genius that is Man Ray, however he called them “Rayographs”, he set the conventions, explored the technique and created variations of this photographic form, but he’s by no means the only person to have ever experimented with this practice. Other notable artists include: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Christian Schad, Imogen Cunningham and even Picasso himself.

However the creation of the photogram came long before this, and was used to capture some of the first images ever created, with Fox Talbert using them to capture leaves, flowers and pieces of lace. It is not these that captivate me though.

The images created my Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy are the ones that do. They tend to be either high contrast powerhouses of angular or swirling smoke like shapes, drifting through the black, blank space behind them; they’re dreamlike, surreal and abstractly beautiful.

I am worried though, that with the onslaught of digital photography and various spools of film being discontinued as we speak – including the famously hipster Polaroid films – that these old techniques that create such magical pictures will be lost, and lost to Photoshop, the bastard.

I implore anyone with even the slightest interest in photography to campaign with me to never forget, always appreciate and save the photogram from the impending disappearance into the memories of the masters.