Cyanotype Printing
The cyanotype process is a wonderful introduction to the world of hand-coated alternative process printing. It’s simple, inexpensive and with low toxicity and environmental impact, which makes it accessible and fun to experiment with.
You can make cyanotypes with very simple and even cameraless setups, making the process ideal for complete beginners and even children. For more advanced students, the process can be refined to produce beautiful and technically accomplished prints from well-calibrated digital negatives.
You can make cyanotypes on many materials, including paper, fabric, wood, and glass. They can be bold and graphic, or subtle and tonal, and their distinctive Prussian blue colour can be altered through toning and hand-colouring. You can make photographic prints using digital negatives, or use the cyanotype process to make photographs, prints from hand-drawn negatives, and experimental, abstract work.
At Lux Darkroom, we run cyanotype workshops and private tuition both as an accessible introduction to the process and as a fine art printing technique, carefully calibrated to produce prints with a full tonal range. We can also produce Cyanotype prints and editions for artists, publishers, and galleries. Contact us for more information.
The Stages of a Cyanotype, From Exposure to the Final Print
A Brief History of Cyanotype
The cyanotype process was invented by the English polymath Sir John Henry Herschel in 1842, just three years after the invention of photography was announced to the public. Herschel was an astronomer, chemist, mathematician, and natural philosopher who was particularly interested in the scientific applications of the emerging medium of photography. As well as inventing the cyanotype, he also discovered the use of sodium thiosulfate as a permanent photographic fixer, which both Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot adopted in place of previous, less reliable methods of fixing.
Herschel was a close friend of Anna Atkins, one of the first woman photographers and a pioneer of both the cyanotype process and the photo book. Like many early photographers, Atkins was also interested in science, in her case botany, and used the cyanotype process to make a remarkable series of photograms of British seaweeds and algae, collected in her book Photographs of British Algae. These early cyanotypes remain in excellent condition, and Atkins’ book can be seen in a number of collections around the world. There are copies in the Natural History Museum and the Horniman in London, and the New York Public Library holds Herschel’s personal copy of the book, given to him by Atkins herself.
The cyanotype process produces striking Prussian blue images, which can be toned in various substances to produce prints in many different colours. Despite its simplicity and low cost, it was not as widely used in the nineteenth century as more popular processes such as the salt print. However, it remained in use well into the twentieth century as a means of reproduction: architectural blueprints, for example, were made with cyanotype chemicals. In the twentieth century, the process began to be used by contemporary artists such as Susan Weil and Robert Rauschenberg, who made a series of large-scale cyanotype photograms around 1950, mostly using Weil’s body as a human negative.
The Cyanotype in Contemporary Art
In recent years, the process has been rediscovered by contemporary artists and explored in relation to its historical context as well as the expressive possibilities it offers. In 2014, the artist Walead Beshty covered the entire wall of the Barbican’s Curve gallery in over 12,000 cyanotypes. In 2015, Lux Darkroom co- founders Constanza Isaza and Andrés Pantoja collaborated with the London Alternative Photography Collective’s Melanie King to produce Ultraviolet, a gigantic Cyanotype photogram. The print, measuring 7.5x15m, was commissioned by the Wellcome Collection and UCL to make for their ‘On Light’ event. At the time, it was the largest cyanotype that had ever been made!
The Cuban artist María Martínez-Cañas uses the cyanotype process to create ethereal photograms of objects placed directly on the paper, while Oliver Beer has recently made cyanotype reproductions of his drawings, echoing the use of the process in architectural blueprints. In his Folding Light series, Lux Darkroom co-founder Andrés Pantoja makes photograms of origami-like shapes made of folded paper and fabric. In the series Prussian Blue, Lux Darkroom co-founder Constanza Isaza explores the expressive potential of cyanotypes by using only paper, light, and chemicals to produce abstract prints. Constanza’s Fabrica series, by contrast, uses the cyanotype process to create photographic prints of a derelict building on lightweight, delicate Kozo paper.