Cyanotype

Though Johann Wolfgang Döbereiner had published in 1831 in German on the light-sensitivity of ferric oxalate,[4][5] of which Herschel became aware during his visit to Hamburg, it is too lightly toned to form a satisfactory image and would require a second reaction to make a permanent print.

Anna Atkins, a friend of the Herschel family, over 1843–61 and with the assistance of Anne Dixon, hand-printed several albums of botanical and textile specimens, especially Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions,[9] effectively the world's first photographically-illustrated books.

[11] Also in the Antipodes, Herbert Dobbie in imitation of Atkins produced a book New Zealand ferns: 148 varieties, but with double-sided pages of cyanotype prints, in 1880.

[12] John Mercer in the 1850s used the process for printing photographs onto cotton textiles and discovered means of toning the cyanotype violet, green, brown, red, or black.

Chemist George Thomas Fisher Jr. quickly disseminated information on the new medium internationally in his popular 1843 fifty-page manual Photogenic manipulation, containing plain instructions in the theory and practice of the arts of photography: calotype, cyanotype, ferrotype, chrysotype, anthotype, daguerreotype, and thermography,[13] which the following year was translated into German and Dutch.

Marion and Company of Paris were first to market the cyanotype, under the proprietary name of "Ferro-prussiate", for reprography of plans and technical drawings and to advantage due to its low cost and simplicity of processing which required only water.

Another unusual characteristic of the cyanotype is its regenerative behavior: prints that have faded due to prolonged exposure to light can often be significantly restored to their original tone by simply temporarily storing them in a dark environment.

[38] It produces distinctive effects and is versatile,[27] enabling prints to be made on a wide variety of surfaces,[24] including paper, wood, fabric,[39] glass, Perspex, bone, shell and eggshell, plaster and ceramics,[26][40] and at any scale; to date 2017, the largest is 276.64 m2 (2977.72 ft2), created by Stefanos Tsakiris in Thessaloniki, Greece, on 18 September 2017.

[41] Robin Hill in 2001 exhibited Sweet Everyday, a 30.5 m (100 ft) cyanotype enwrapping Lennon, Weinberg, Inc.'s Soho gallery, and evoking wavy brushstrokes by placing ordinary shopping bags on photo-sensitive paper exposed to light.

[38] In France, from the end of the 1970s, Nancy Wilson-Pajic made cyanotype photograms of everything from a broken windshield to herself (Falling Angels), and eventually several long series of museum collections and of Haute-Couture robes by Christian Lacroix and other designers.

"[53] Consequently, the process devolved to the proofing of domestic negatives by hobbyist photographers and to postcards, though another British scientist, Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society[54] Washington Teasdale,[55] delivered hundreds of lectures throughout his lifetime and was among the first to illustrate them with lantern slides, and, up to 1890, to record his experiments and specimens, used the cyanotype, a collection of which is held at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford.

[58] While artistic in execution they also satisfy with the scientific interests of the group as each subject is photographed nude with front, back and profile views, not in the field but in his studio.

[8] From the early 1850s through the 1870s Corot, with associated artists working in and near the town Barbizon adopted the hand-drawn cliché-verre, and though most were printed on salted or albumenized paper, some used the cyanotype.

Pictorialists, throughout Europe and other western countries, in efforts to have photography accepted as an art form, emphasised handcraft in printing, in imitation of painting and drawing, and drew on Symbolist subject matter and themes.

Alfred Steiglitz in White's portrait of him (1907) held in Princeton University Art Museum, appears gloweringly critical in the cyanotype print preserved there.

[63] At the turn of the century, painter-photographer Edward Steichen, then associated with Alfred Steiglitz who promoted the Photo-Secession and Pictorialism through his Camera Work (1903–1917) produced prints of Midnight Lake George now held in The Alfred Stieglitz Collection: Photographs at the Art Institute of Chicago where in 2007 scientific examination of the prints and his records concluded that cyanotype had been incorporated in their predominant gum bichromate over platinum production.

"[64] Photo-Secessionist Franco-American Paul Burty-Havilland, involved through marriage with the Lalique company, evinces a Japonisme in his moody cyanotype portraits and nudes made between 1898–1920.

[65] Another American Pictorialist Fred Holland Day made cyanotypes of youths, nude or in sailor suits, in 1911, that are held in the Library of Congress,[66] and French artist Charles-François Jeandel printed his erotic imagery of bound women in his painting workshop in Paris and then in Charente 1890–1900.

[67] The more traditional American printmaker Bertha Jaques, aligned with the antimodernist views of the late Victorian Arts and Crafts movement, from 1894 produced more than a thousand cyanotype photographs of wildflowers.

[69][8] Arthur Wesley Dow's modernist approach was influential on the Pictorialists in the eloquently simple compositions of his New England environment, like Pine Tree (1895),[70] a cyanotype, related to his interest, while studying in France, in the flat, decorative qualities of Japanese art and that of Les Nabis.

He drew inspiration from Léger's Ballet Mécanique, Surrealism via the Metaphysical painting of Georgio de Chirico, and fellow photographer Giuseppe Cavalli with whom, convinced of the essential 'uselessness' of art, in 1947 he founded a group named La Bussola (The Compass).

[72][73] In a 2008 essay A.D. Coleman perceived a return of the legacy Pictorialist methods being applied in art photography from 1976,[62] a tendency represented in Francesca Woodman's late cyanotypes and in contact prints by Barbara Kasten and Bea Nettles.

[74] Weston Naef, curator of photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, in a 1998 New York Times article by critic Lyle Rexer, confirmed that "Looking back at [photography's] pioneers, today's artists see a way to restore expression to an art beguiled by technology," referring to the loss of 'intimacy' in digital imaging to account for artists' attraction to daguerreotypes, tintypes, cyanotypes, stereopticon images, albumen prints, collodion wet plates; all physical and 'hands-on' methods.

[75] Artists David McDermott and Peter McGough, who met in the East Village New York art scene of the 1980s, and until 1995 took the phenomenon to the extreme of reconstructing themselves as Victorian gentlemen, adopting the lifestyle and documenting it and their possessions using vintage cameras and materials, first inspired by their discovery of the cyanotype, and dating their contemporary works in the nineteenth century.

In the book of the 2022 British exhibition Squaring the Circles of Confusion: Neo-Pictorialism in the 21st Century eight contemporary artists: Takashi Arai, Céline Bodin, Susan Derges, David George, Joy Gregory, Tom Hunter, Ian Phillips-McLaren and Spencer Rowell employ the craft of photography for postmodern purpose, including the cyanotype.

Betty Hahn was early to incorporate cyanotype with other art media including hand-painting with embroidery as a feminist statement[80] Meghann Riepenhoff reprises Anna Atkins by exposing her prepared papers underneath the waves, so light filters through moving sand, shells, and water currents.

[45][81] Canadian Erin Shirreff translates her sculptural interests into large-scale cyanotype photograms of temporary three-dimensional compositions in her studio with hours-long exposures during which component forms are moved, added or subtracted for transparent effect.

Icelandic artist and filmmaker Inga Lísa Middleton employs the cyanotype for nostalgic representations of her homeland, and as a symbolic colour in imagery alerting audiences to an emerging catastrophe in the marine environment.

British-born American resident Walead Beshty's Barbican Art Gallery installation of 12,000 cyanotype prints traces a visual time line from October 2013 to September 2014 in a work called A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench, produced from each object from the artists' studio being exposed on cyanotype-coated found paper, card or wood.