Cyanotype

The Blueprint in Contemporary Practice

Christina Anderson

• Publisher: Focal Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429805974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photographie

Cyanotype: The Blueprint in Contemporary Practice is a two part book on the much admired blue print process. Part One is a comprehensive how-to on the cyanotype process for both beginner and advanced practitioners, with lots of photographs and clear, step-by-step directions and formulas. Part Two highlights contemporary artists who are using cyanotype, making work that ranges from the photographic to the abstract, from the traditional to the conceptual, with tips on their personal cyanotype methods alongside their work. These artists illustrate cyanotype's widespread use in contemporary photography today, probably the most of any alternative process.

Book features include:

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• A brief discussion of the practice of the process with some key historical points

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• How to set up the cyanotype ÒdimroomÓ

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• The most extensive discussion of suitable papers to date, with data from 100+ papers

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• Step-by-step digital negative methods for monochrome and duotone negatives

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• Chapters on classic, new, and other cyanotype formulas

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• Toning to create colors from yellow to brown to violet

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• Printing cyanotype over palladium, for those who want to temper cyanotype's blue nature

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• Printing cyanotype on alternate surfaces such as fabric, glass, and wood

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• More creative practice ideas for cyanotype such as handcoloring and gold leafing

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• Troubleshooting cyanotype, photographically illustrated

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• Finishing, framing, and storing cyanotype

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• Contemporary artists' advice, techniques, and works

Cyanotype is backed with research from 120 books, journals, and magazine articles from 1843 to the present day. It is richly illustrated with 400 photographs from close to 80 artists from 14 countries. It is a guide for the practitioner, from novice to expert, providing inspiration and proof of cyanotype's original and increasing place in historical and contemporary photography.

Figure 1.1. Little Cyan Face, cyanotype on paper, 9″ × 12″ © Brenton Hamilton 2017. “Working with cameraless techniques I find and recreate pictures from culture, refashioning the cut and collaged image works into something new. I am especially drawn to cyanotype and all of its hues. My storytelling and yarn spinning with images takes on and implies a radical new possibility. Paint, gold leaf, silver and the iconic deep blue-black are the palette of my cyanotype works.” For over 20 years Brenton Hamilton has created a sustained body of work, largely concentrated within historic processes. Hamilton is a well-known teacher on the campus of Maine Media Workshops, Rockport, Maine. To see more of his work visit brentonhamilton.com.

Chapter 1

Cyanotype–History and Practice

Figures 1.2 and 1.3. Left, Miao Child; right, Miao Maiden, new cyanotype © Hua Cheng 2018. “The photographic print as an end product and the appreciation for the fine craft associated with its production was foreign to those of us in China until at least the 1980s. The image as existed in newspapers or magazines was all we saw, besides some gelatin-silver prints made in the darkroom for mostly political and news coverage. So the print for an aesthetic end was a more recent idea. When Sam Wang and Sandy King showed us handcrafted prints, they opened the floodgate and we became very interested to learn to make them. The traditional cyanotype was the first process we tried, partly for its seeming simplicity and low cost. Our first attempts were far from good because of the difficulty of finding right ingredients locally. Instead of the green ferric ammonium citrate we found only the brown kind of unknown purity and the prints wouldn’t clear in the wash. When we came across new cyanotype, we tried it and it worked! It overcame the problems Dr. Ware mentioned as reasons for developing the new formula and we were able to find the right chemicals domestically. These images came from scanned medium format negatives. The paper I found worked best was an inexpensive Canson sold by the local art stores. For exposure, I use an LED UV exposure unit made by a factory in Hangzhou, whose owner was very interested in helping us tune the UV to the exact wavelength that we needed. For developing, I use a 5% citric acid bath, and begin the wash cycle when the image looks right.” After a very successful professional photographic career, Hua Cheng joined the photography faculty at the Nanjing Arts Institute, now called The Nanjing University of the Arts, about two hours from Shanghai, China. Now retired from teaching, he enjoys traveling, continues to photograph, and has been making mostly carbon transfer prints.

In 1900, almost sixty years after the invention of cyanotype, one author penned, “The indifference of the photographic world to the ‘blue print’ is one of the seven wonders of that little world.”¹ He would therefore be surprised to see that today, cyanotype is probably the most widely practiced alternative process there is.

The process has its beginnings in the year 1842, merely three years after the invention of photography itself. Sir John Herschel discovered that ferric ammonium citrate in combination with potassium ferricyanide would become a photosensitive emulsion that yielded a beautiful blue color. Since that year, what is now known as the blueprint or cyanotype process has been taught all over the world from kindergarten classrooms to university labs. Yet cyanotype has hardly achieved the same cachet as other processes.

Cyanotype’s benefits

It is easy to understand why cyanotype is so widely practiced. It is the perfect first-foray into alt for the following reasons:

• It doesn’t require a darkroom

• It’s inexpensive

• It’s easy to mix up the two required chemicals

• The chemicals are for the most part non-toxic

• The cyanotype formulas vary widely but they all still work, making cyanotype somewhat foolproof; you could almost throw a little of this and a little of that into some water and it will still work

• Although exposure times are slower than most alt processes, it is a printing out process (POP), which can easily be inspected during exposure to monitor completion

• It only requires a water wash for development

• It can be used on many different surfaces aside from paper and is especially suited to fabric

• It is not so humidity-picky as other alternative processes such as platinum, meaning it works well in all climates²

• It is very archival.

Cyanotype’s detriments

Cyanotype has a few drawbacks. It is slow to expose. It has a reputation for being a short exposure scale aka high contrast process,³ which may have been problematic back in analog days when film negatives were the norm. The process was always blamed, as one author noted:

Blue Prints…are extremely beautiful if properly made, and possess great artistic merit, the bad repute into which they at one time fell being due to improper coating of the paper and careless manipulation on the part of the operator. Apparently the easiest to handle of all photographic papers, every tyro in the art of printing felt himself to be above instruction, and licenses to the most careless and slovenly manipulation. Feeling himself a past master in the art of blue printing, the paper was invariably blamed for every defect, and any suggestion that the negative or the operator was at fault met with the universal comment, “Do you suppose I don’t know how to make a blue print?” Well, usually he didn’t! This paper renders faithfully every gradation of the negative, and is remarkably rich in soft and delicate definition, the color of the print being a rich Prussian blue with beautiful china-white highlights.⁴

Nowadays with digital negatives, contrast is changed with the press of a button. Cyanotype does not have to be high contrast with blown out highlights and blocked up shadows. When practiced properly with a well-executed digital negative and suitable paper choices, it has delicate highlights and detailed shadows rivaling platinum.

Singing the blues

A complaint often repeated is about cyanotype’s blue color. When blue is the most preferred color of all colors, with 40% of people naming it as their number one color of choice,⁵ why would a blue print not be preferred? When did black and white, or brown for that matter, become photographic norms, and not blue, especially since cyanotype was at the very beginning of photographic practice? Adelaide Skeel, an astute practitioner of the cyanotype process in the late 1800s, and well aware of the prejudice against cyanotype, theorized that brown, black, and white, but not blue, became photographic norms because nature was translated to those colors in printed books and journals.⁶

Cyanotype’s blue has been accused of being insistently blue,⁷ disagreeably blue, not for the production of real photographs,⁸ cloying,⁹ ugly in tone,¹⁰ forbidding,¹¹ a color not suitable for the average subject,¹² a color “severed from any neutral relation to observed reality,”¹³ and the list goes on. This is odd, given the popularity of Delft and Wedgwood china, with exactly the same color palette of a cyanotype print.

Cyanotype was pigeonholed into strictly defined “appropriate” subject matter. P. H. Emerson, an influential writer in the 1800s, famously stated, “No one but a vandal would print a landscape in red, or in cyanotype.”¹⁴ Acceptable subjects were ice and glacier scenes,¹⁵ seascapes, cloudscapes, river, lake, and water scenery,¹⁶ interiors, winter scenes,¹⁷ moonlight “fakes,”¹⁸ and cool, serene imagery.¹⁹ One author elaborated:

The negative should determine when to use “Blue Print Paper.” Moreover, the type of picture should also be considered. It does not seem to me that groups of people or pictures of animals look well in this brand, and I have always restricted its use, not entirely of course, but nearly, to pictures where water and foliage entered in greater or less proportions. A water scene with a somewhat distant background is lovely in this print, while for a pure black and white tone the same picture might not look so well. Rocks, fences, cedar trees, and buildings all show up nicely in the blue print, because in na...