Pixiq

With the current exhibition Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, it is timely to look at an historic technique for producing images without a camera. Back in 1995, the National Trust commissioned several photographers to take pictures for their Centenary Exhibition.  My brief was to cover NT gardens, and I agreed on the condition that I made cyanotypes (blueprints) from plants growing in the gardens – which thrilled the organizer. She did not know I had never produced one before, but I love to set myself a challenge with a deadline!

After doing some research, I tracked down two chemicals (ammonium ferric citrate and potassium ferricyanide) that were mixed together (wear gloves) in the darkroom to make a yellow solution for painting onto art paper, which was hung up to dry overnight. The next day (still working in the darkroom), I laid a flower on a single sheet of coated paper above a sheet of artist's board and covered the specimen with a sheet of glass held in place by taping it onto the board. My first shots had no glass, but I soon discovered this was essential to avoid light 'creep' beneath a three-dimensional specimen.

The paper is exposed to sunlight for a few minutes. The time depends on the strength of the sun and I found that days with a light cloud cover where preferable to direct sun, because this gave me longer exposures. After the paper changed color to a dark blue, I fixed it by immersing it in tap water in the shade. This lightened the blue background to an attractive Prussian blue setting off the life sized white (negative) image to perfection.

Sun prints date back to the C19 when W.H.Fox Talbot (1800-1877) used photosensitive paper to create negative images (like photograms in the darkroom) of flowers, leaves  and feathers exposed to the sun.  But it was Talbot's friend Sir John Herschel (1792- 1871) who invented the cyanotype process in 1842.

Anna Atkins (1799-1871), an English botanist and photographer, was a woman ahead of her times. After her mother died when she was a toddler, she became close to her father who was a scientist. Both her father and her husband knew Fox Talbot and Herschel, so Anna Atkins would have seen and known about their photographic prints. In 1843, she began to make blueprints of her dried seaweeds, flowers and grasses.  She was so productive that she became the first person to produce a complete book illustrated with photographs – her botanical blueprints of seaweeds.

By the 1870's, a cyanotype paper became available for architects to make their blueprint copies. Nowadays, several companies produce cyanotype packs including Solargraphics®, which make an educational kit for kids. Since cyanotype paper reacts to UV light, it can also be exposed by fluorescent black lights.

My cyanotypes (posted here) for the National Trust exhibition were displayed in glass topped tables.  At the Private View, I overheard someone saying 'Oh I see they have found some Anna Atkins prints'! At which stage I had to interject, but nonetheless I enjoyed the compliment paid to someone who was a complete novice at using the cyanotype process.