[Album of Fabric Designs]

262 photographs fill the pages of this album, but at first glance, few are recognizable as such. Most were made without a camera, testing the limits of photography in service of another discipline: the fabric arts. Maker Jean Piénoz devised photographic means of producing pattern designs for fabric. Using light-sensitive photo paper, he conducted experiments in photogram and cliché verre, often finishing his prints with expressive hand coloring.



This album tracks Piénoz’s career in the Lyonnaise textile industry between the 1930s and the 1960s. An innovator of wearable photography, he secured patents for photo-badges, brooches, and cufflinks, as well as for the printing of the photographic patterns gathered here. Like New York photographer Edward Steichen, who produced photographic patterns for silk around the same time, Piénoz was inspired by ordinary objects, using everything from flowers to fishing lures in his decorative motifs. The pages of his album reveal changing trends in midcentury textile design. Their patterns range from modernist compositions in the style of Man Ray to exuberant proto-pop motifs. Seen together, they catalog the creative possibilities of photography in the applied realms of fashion and decorative arts.