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 nature there is enough of this tint about those things to have a correspondence to the view. The horizon seems blue, cloud effects are bluish and white, and so on; while human beings in groups would not look well or even natural in blue tints. If the presence of people in a scene is only incidental and does not play any great importance in it, then it is legitimate to use the blue print.²⁰

Figure 1.4. Old House #2, 31 × 24 cm, © Jianming Zhong 2017. “These were done to document the fast disappearing old buildings in China, most of which have now been abandoned, but still retain evidence of lives lived. With the rapid rate of change experienced everywhere in China, I felt the great need to make images before these places disappear. The prints were all made with traditional cyanotype on rice paper, the paper of choice in Chinese painting. The paper is unsized and allows the liquid to flow, a sense of spontaneity I felt important to retain.” Jianming Zhong began his photography career at age 20. Twenty-five years later, after a successful professional photography practice, he joined the faculty at the Nanjing Arts Institute, now the Nanjing University of the Arts, and founded its photography program in 2001. He was introduced to alternative processes a few years later by visiting professor Sam Wang, but did not begin seriously making alternative process photographs until 2015. A prolific writer, Zhong has authored 5 books. One was Handcrafted: Art and Practice of the Handmade Print, coauthored with Christina Z. Anderson, Sandy King, and Sam Wang. His work has been exhibited in Australia, South Korea, the US, and China. He has curated more than 10 exhibitions, and organized numerous conferences on photography in higher education in addition to workshops on photographic printmaking practices.

Though this prejudice of pigeonholing cyanotype to particular subject matter still exists today, this book will show cyanotype can “do it all.”

The psychology of blue

Our emotional responses to color in general are culturally and individually conditioned.²¹ Blue is the most popular color, which carries both positive (serenity, peace, spirituality) and negative connotations as do all colors. It is linked to depression in the term “feeling blue.” It is linked to woeful music, the Blues. It is linked to pornography since at least the 1960s in the term “blue movie” although that term is not as well known today. It is linked to death at least since Shakespeare’s time when “to burn blue” was an omen of death, evil spirits, or the devil himself.²² Today it’s probably most linked with tranquility tinged with a bit of melancholy.

Of reproduction and amateurs

With all this prejudice, and other printing processes being invented left and right in the 1800s, cyanotype was only occasionally practiced 1840–1880, and didn’t become popular until the late 1880s to the 1920s.²³ There are, however, five well-known photographers who worked in cyanotype: Edward Curtis, Frederick Holland Day, Arthur Wesley Dow, Henry Bosse,²⁴ and Frederick Coulson. It was mostly considered a process for quick proofing of prints but not for finished works.

Cyanotype was also a popular postcard medium, but the cyanotype postcard was replaced with black and white postcards when Kodak came out with the 3A Folding Pocket Camera with negatives that perfectly fit the postcard format.²⁵

Despite such a lengthy presence, Beaumont Newhall didn’t even mention cyanotype in his classic The History of Photography.²⁶

Proofing negatives and making postcards—not only was cyanotype cheap and easy, it was a means to a better end and also a bit amateurish. Cyanotype was described as “cheap, reliable, and within the reach of all.”²⁷ It was said, “The paper may be prepared by the amateur himself, or he may use with success some standard brand found on the market ready prepared.”²⁸ From the 1870s through World War I it was most popular with amateurs,²⁹ akin to photo scrapbooking today.

Certainly, the most common use of the cyanotype process was for blueprints in architecture. In my research it was more often referred to as the blueprint process or the ferroprussiate process instead of cyanotype. By at least 1880 it was said, “The chief use of the process is for copying plans and drawings such as are used by engineers and architects…”³⁰ This iteration of the cyanotype process would not earn cachet in photographic history. Herschel himself used cyanotype to copy his notes, like a handmade Xerox machine. This seed of reproduction has been there since cyanotype’s infancy. Emerson said in 1889, “…blue prints are only for plans, not for pictures.”³¹

Nancy Kathryn Burns’ hypothesis in Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period, is that the use of cyanotype by amateurs and in industry in the form of blueprints placed cyanotype outside the margins of what was considered photographic, and placed the process in an ambiguous space between reproduction and photo reproduction.³² That contemporary photography has embraced cyanotype and its “otherness” stands to reason.

Where to next?

The lack of cyanotype’s cachet can be related to a number of factors outlined here. Cyanotype’s drawbacks of assumed short scale and long exposure, its overtly blue color, the historical lineage of its industrial use, its pigeonholing into certain subject matter, its adoption by amateurs, etc., can all be contributory factors, but given the current level of practice and press, its first museum show devoted to cyanotype in 2016, Facebook groups devoted to the process, and its use by certain well-known artists—John Dugdale, Robert Rauschenberg, Christian Marclay, Marco Breuer—cyanotype’s acceptance has been and continues to be growing. The cyanotype is a good fit for postmodern thought where its vivid blue calls attention to objectness,³³ to fiction not fact.

A few key events in cyanotype’s history

Following is a timeline that touches upon a few interesting events and people who figured largely in the process from 1842 to present day. For a more comprehensive history see Larry Schaaf’s and Mike Ware’s books cited in the Bibliography.

•  Cyanotype’s history starts with Prussian blue. In 1706 Prussian blue was discovered by a Swiss color maker living in Berlin, Johann Jacob Diesbach.³⁴ Blue was costly before this time, so the discovery of an inexpensive blue was revolutionary. Diesbach shared his discovery with Berlin chemist Johann Frisch who started selling it in 1708. Until 1724 the method of making Prussian blue was kept a secret, but in 1724 John Woodward disclosed it to the public.³⁵

•  In the 1820s–1830s Prussian blue pigment made its way through the trade routes. The Dutch imported Prussian blue to Japan and China.³⁶ Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mt. Fuji were in Prussian blue on white,³⁷ and Hokusai’s Great Wave Off Kanagawa is probably as well recognized as Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe silkscreen prints.

•  The 1840s was a perfect storm for cyanotype. Alfred Smee presented his paper on how to make potassium ferricyanide from potassium ferrocyanide to the Royal Society June 18, 1840. Not too long thereafter, 1842, Smee sent Sir John Frederick William Herschel potassium ferricyanide. On April 23, 1842 Herschel made note of Prussian blue being formed on paper, and therefore the photographic properties of potassium ferricyanide.³⁸ It was Smee who told Herschel about ferric ammonium citrate and ferric ammonium tartrate which could increase the sensitivity of potassium ferricyanide.³⁹ Herschel took Smee’s information and ran with it. His paper “On the Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Vegetable Colours, and on Some New Photographic Processes” was read before the Society on June 16, 1842, and printed in September of that same year in Philosophical Transactions.⁴⁰ He used the name “cyanotype” in his Memoranda August 16 of that year, and on August 29 he used “cyanotype” to refer to all photographic processes that resulted in Prussian blue.⁴¹

Figures 1.5 and 1.6. Left, Scenic South Dakota (n.d), 10″ × 8″; right, I Love Paula (n.d.), 7″ × 5″, traditional cyanotype on Arches Cover © Michael Flecky 2018. Michael Flecky teaches fine art photography at Creighton University. His photographs have appeared in over 30 one-person exhibitions in the US. His work has taken him to the UK and Ireland, Scandinavia, the Dominican Republic, and North Africa. He has received artist residency grants from Ucross Foundation; Dorland Mountain Arts Colony; Hambidge Center; and the New York, North Carolina and Nebraska Arts Councils. Flecky’s subjects include natural landscapes, figure studies, studio and found objects. In addition to cyanotype, he practices traditional photographic processes, platinum, palladium, and Van Dyke brown. His Hopkins in Ireland: Pictures and Words was published by Creighton University Press in 2008.

•  The very first photo book was created by a woman, Anna Children Atkins (1799–1871), in 1843, the year before Talbot’s Pencil of Nature.⁴² Atkins was the daughter of zoologist John George Children.⁴³ Children was a member of the Fellowship of the Royal Society from 1807 on, so he would have been aware of Herschel’s discovery in 1842.⁴⁴ Atkins was a botanist and a member of the Botanical Society of London since 1839.⁴⁵ Atkins combined her passion in botany with cyanotype and created organic photograms which resulted in 3 volumes of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions 1843–1853.⁴⁶ She issued the work in fascicles, the first being released in October of 1843.⁴⁷ Ten years later, Atkins had completed 389 pages of captioned plates and 14 pages of titles and text. More than a dozen copies were produced and distributed, and one to Talbot.⁴⁸

•  1864–1933 Frederick Holland Day used cyanotype to make prints.⁴⁹

•  During the 1870s and through World War 1 cyanotype was a popular process with amateurs.⁵⁰ Commercial cyanotype papers were available for purchase from the 1870s to about 1930.⁵¹

•  Marion’s Papier Ferro Prussiate was released in 1872.⁵²

•  Henri Le Secq (1818–1882) used cyanotype to print his photographs because the silver photographs he had made did not last.⁵³ Close to the same time, Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) printed his locomotion prints in cyanotype.⁵⁴ Le Secq used cyanotype to make finished prints, whereas Muybridge used the process to proof prints, though they are now part of his photographic legacy.

•  The main uses of the cyanotype process since 1842 were for botanical purposes (still popular today in the ubiquitous organic cyanotype photogram), in architecture for the blueprint, for proofing negatives, and for making postcards. Even in the latter two decades of the 19th century it was criticized as acceptable for pictorial work.⁵⁵

•  Henry P. Bosse (1844–1903) used the cyanotype process extensively to chronicle the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and St. Louis. Between 1883 and 1893 he made close to 900 cyanotype prints. The prints are quite beautiful, oval, somewhat large (10.25˝ × 13˝), on off white paper. Bosse’s work is considered a landmark in the use of photography to redefine cartography. There were 345 different scenes in five albums, although each album does not contain all scenes.⁵⁶ Bosse’s work chronicled the first systematic effort to recast the upper Mississippi from a natural river to a modern commercial highway.⁵⁷

•  Washington Teasdale (1831–1903) did a lot of cyanotype during the 1880s.⁵⁸

•  In 1891 it was described as a “popular process” but more popular in America than in England.⁵⁹

•  Frederick Coulson (b. 1869) did a minimum of 340 cyanotypes between 1890 and 1908. The cyanotypes date from his years as a draftsman when he was working in downtown Worcester in the Walker Building, home to the offices of architects and commercial photographers. He himself was an architect. In 1884 the Worcester Camera Club was formed and its studio was in Coulson’s building. The club held meetings in the Worcester Natural History Society of which Coulson was a member. Photography was becoming recognized as an art form during this time, all a perfect storm for his photographs.⁶⁰

•  Utah State University has 2600+ cyanotypes of its history 1896–1916, many done by alumnus George Melvin Turpin.⁶¹

•  Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) made forty-one cyanotypes of his hometown Ipswich in New England, around 1899, and dedicated his personal album to his friend the poet Everett Stanley Hubbard.⁶²

•  In 1900 cyanotype was used during the Boer War, when the defenders of Mafeking ran short of money and stamps. Lieutenant Colonel Baden-Powell had amateur photographer, E. J. Ross issue these in cyanotype. Five negatives were made from Baden-Powell’s design of a pound note, and 100 prints copied from each. The “Mint” was a dugout, and Ross succeeded in turning out twenty pound notes a day, each with two signatures. For stamps two different designs were used, for the values of 1d and 3d, the latter with a portrait of Powell. Both bear the inscription “Siege of Mafeking.”⁶³

•  In the 1900s to 1920s pre-coated cyanotype postcards were commercially available in the USA.⁶⁴

•  Paul Burty Haviland (1880–1950) was a lesser-known member of the Photo-secessionists. He did a lot of cyanotypes including portraits and nudes. However, in the catalog of the works it is noted they were most likely proofs of his negatives.⁶⁵ Paul Burty Haviland’s and Henri Le Secq’s cyanotypes are in French museums today.⁶⁶

•  In 1903 Kodak came out with the 3A Folding Pocket Camera, which featured rolled film 3^¼ ˝ × 5^½˝ negatives specifically for postcards. Postcards went from cyanotype to gelatin silver, as did commercially prepared printing out papers like cyanotype and platinum. By the end of World War I, cyanotype largely disappeared except in blue prints for architecture and engineering.⁶⁷

•  In 1916 Kodak quit manufacturing their commercial cyanotype paper.⁶⁸

•  From around 1910 or so Edward S. Curtis made cyanotypes, which can be seen in the Canadian National Gallery in Ottawa. He used cyanotype to proof negatives in the field. Curtis made about 40,000 negatives, and a lot of his cyanotypes still exist.⁶⁹

Figure 1.7. Hammock at #91, new cyanotype printed on Arches HP watercolor paper, hatbox pinhole camera and ortho film, 30″ × 14″ © Dianna Rust 2014. “Whatever means I use to capture my images, whether it be from a homemade hatbox pinhole camera to a modern scanner, or, as with photograms, no camera at all, I continue to be fascinated by what is mirrored back is no longer a literal interpretation of what was in front of me. In a time when we are so surrounded and bombarded by the ills and sadness of this earth, I hope that the work I do can bring some tranquility, peace, and nourishment for the soul. My vision is often guided by a quote from Charles Burchfield (painter, 1893-1967), ‘The only divine reality is the unspeakable beauty of the world.’” To see more of Rust’s work, visit www.diannarust.com.

•  During World War I, a journal remarked that ferric ammonium citrate was particularly costly as a consequence of the war.⁷⁰

•  Cyanotype is surprisingly absent from the literature from the 1920s to the 1950s, although it was in wide use by engineers in 1931. Blue print paper was obtainable in three grades, fast, medium, and slow, and in most cut sizes and rolls of various lengths.⁷¹ Its role as copy machine was vast, but its role as fine art, not so much. Gelatin silver was the norm at this time—think Ansel Adams. During the 1950s the blue print was also replaced by diazo and other processes.⁷²

•  In the 1960s a few contemporary photographers broke away from the limitations of straight photography.⁷³ The artists had a common goal to expand, test, and change the definition of photography through the use of nontraditional photographic materials.⁷⁴ This was a generation that rebelled against big box stores like Kodak and returned to hand coated processes and making one’s own paper. Nineteenth century processes in general and cyanotype in particular finally became part of art photography.⁷⁵

•  In 1994 Mike Ware invented a new form of cyanotype using ferric ammonium oxalate instead of ferric ammonium citrate which he published in 1995. This solved the slow exposure problem inherent in classic cyanotype, among other things. Dr. Ware was the first person to delve deeply into the history and practice of cyanotype. His book Cyanotype, The history, science, and art of photographic printing in Prussian blue was published in 1999 and has been the definitive cyanotype text since then. Ware has continued to update this book, now out of print, and offers it as a free download on his website (see the Bibliography). It is an excellent text from a scientific and conservator perspective.

•  In 2016 the Worcester art museum mounted the exhibition Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period from January 16 to April 24, the first museum exhibition devoted to the cyanotype process.⁷⁶

•  In 2018, in honor of the 175th anniversary of Anna Atkin’s British Algae, the New York Public Library mounted two exhibitions devoted to Atkins and the cyanotype, one called Anna Atkins Refracted: Contemporary Works, an exhibition of nineteen contemporary artists working in cyanotype. It is a fitting year for the publication of this book, as tribute to the woman who created the first photographically illustrated book, and who initiated the organic cyanotype photogram still widely practiced today.

Endnotes

1. Tennant, John. A., ed. “The ‘Blue Print’ and its Variations” in The Photo-Miniature, Vol. 1, No. 10, January 1900, p. 481.

2. Hawkes, Lieut. H. P. Photography in a Nutshell, by “The Kernel.” London: Iliffe, Sons & Sturmey Ltd, 1898, p. 91.

3. “Printing Process” in The Photographic News, The Journal for Amateur Photographers, Vol. XLI. London: Photographic News, April 2 1897, p. 222.

4. Worthington, J. C., and J. C. Millen. The Photographic Primer, A Manual of Practice. Riverton: The Riverton Press, 1897, pp. 91–92.

5. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Blue: Cobalt to Cerulean in Art and Culture. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2015, p. 17.

6. Skeel, Adelaide. “Something More About the Blues” in The Photographic Times, Vol. XXI. New York: Scovill Manufacturing Company, January 30 1891, pp. 54–55.

7. Burns, Nancy Kathryn and Kristina Wilson. Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period. Worcester, Massachusetts: Worcester Art Museum, 2016, p. 13.

8. Burns and Wilson, p. 14.

9. Rexer, Lyle. Photography’s Antiquarian Avant-Garde. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002, p. 106.

10. Hamblin, R. A. “Hints to Beginners on Choosing a Printing Process” in The Photographic News, The Journal for Amateur Photographers, Vol. XLI. London: Photographic News, July 16 1897, p. 456.

11. MacLean, Hector. Popular Photographic Printing Processes. London: L. Upcott Gill, 1898, p. 89.

12. “The Workroom-Cyanotype” in The Photographic Journal of America, Vol. LV. Philadelphia: Edward L. Wilson Company, Inc., February 1918, pp. 93–94.

13. Rexer, p. 106.

14. Emerson, P. H. Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art. London: Dawbarn & Ward, Limited, 1899, p. 139.

15. Wall, E. J. “The Iron Salts I” in American Photography, Vol. XVI, November 1922, p. 682.

16. Brown, George E. Ferric and Heliographic Processes: A Handbook for Photographers, Draughtsmen, and Sun Printers. New York: Tennant & Ward, 1900 [First edition 1900, reprinted 1905, this edition n.d.], p. 7.

17. The Modern Way in Picture Making: Published as an Aid to the Amateur Photographer. Rochester: Eastman Kodak Co., 1905, p. 120.

18. Hamblin, p. 456.

19. House, Suda. Artistic Photographic Processes. New York: American Photographic Book Publishing, 1981, p. 35.

20. Wike, B. H. “Choice of Papers” in Popular Photography, Vol. II. Boston, Massachusetts: F. R. Fraprie, July 1914, pp. 415–416.

21. Burns and Wilson, p. 28.

22. Wood, John. The Photographic Arts. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1997, p. 42.

23. Reilly, James. Care and Identification of 19th Century Photographic Prints. Rochester: Eastman Kodak, 1986, p. 70.

24. Burns and Wilson, p. 13.

25. Ibid.

26. https://photographmag.com/reviews/cyanotypes-photographys-blue-period-at-the-worcester-art-museum/

27. Burns and Wilson, p. 17.

28. Worthington and Millen, p. 127.

29. Burns and Wilson, p. 13.

30. Pitt, Marion. Practical Guide to Photography. London: Marion and Co., 1880, pp. 210–212.

31. Burns and Wilson, p. 18.

32. Ibid., pp. 13–19.

33. http://worcestermag.com/2016/01/07/worcester-art-museum-presents-cyanotypes-photographys-blue-period/39218

34. Ware, Mike. Cyanomicon II, History, Science and Art of Cyanotype: photographic printing in Prussian blue. Buxton: self-published, 2016, pp. 26–27. http://www.mikeware.co.uk/mikeware/downloads.html.

35. Ibid., pp. 33–34.

36. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, p. 132.

37. Wehrenberg, Charles. Mississippi Blue, Henry P. Bosse and his Views on the Mississippi River Between Minneapolis and St. Louis, 1883–1891. Santa Fe, New Mexico: Twin Palms Publishers, 2002, p. 13.

38. Ware, pp. 44–46.

39. Ibid., p. 48.

40. Ibid., p. 51.

41. Ibid., pp. 53–54.

42. Barnier, John. Coming Into Focus, a Step-by-Step Guide to Alternative Photographic Printing Processes. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000, p. 38.

43. Coe, Brian and Mark Haworth-Booth. A Guide to Early Photographic Processes. London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1983, p. 78.

44. Ware, p. 136.

45. Schaaf, Larry J. Out of the Shadows. Herschel, Talbot, & the Invention of Photography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 130.

46. Coe and Haworth-Booth, p. 19.

47. Ware, p. 141

48. Schaaf, p. 13.

49. Burns and Wilson, p. 13.

50. Ibid.

51. Barnier, p. 38.

52. Ware, p. 64.

53. Ibid., p. 150.

54. Ibid., p. 155.

55. Ibid., pp. 11–14.

56. Wehrenberg, pp. 8–12.

57. Ibid., pp. 155–159.

58. Ware, p. 13.

59. Harrison, Jerome. “The Chemistry of Silver Printing, Printing with Salts of Iron—Cyanotype and Kallitype” in Photographic Times, Vol. XXI, September 4 1891, pp. 440–442.

60. Welu, James A. Frederick Coulson, Blueprints of a Golden Age. Worcester, Massachusetts: Worcester Art Museum, 2016, pp. 11–13.

61. Ware, p. 154.

62. Ibid., p. 152.

63. Gernsheim, Helmut, p. 170, from the British Journal of Photography August 24, 1900 and Professor Eric Stenger, Photo Magazin, June 1952, p. 50.

64. Ware, p. 154.

65. Ibid., p. 151.

66. Ibid., p. 14.

67. Burns and Wilson, p. 13.

68. Ibid., p. 21.

69. Ware, pp. 154–155.

70. Fraprie, Frank Roy, ed. American Photography, Vol. XVI, 1922. Boston: American Photographic Publishing Company, 1922, p. 119.

71. Neblette, C. B. Photography, Its Principles and Practice, 2nd ed. London: Chapman & Hall, Ltd, 1931, pp. 460–461.

72. Ware, p. 17.

73. John Michael Kohler Arts Center. The Alternative Image. Sheboygan, Wisconsin: John Michael Kohler Arts Center, 1983, pp. vii–viii.

74. Kohler, p. viii.

75. Burns and Wilson, p.13.

76. http://www.worcesterart.org/exhibitions/cyanotypes-photographys-blue-period/

Figures 1.8–1.15. © Dario Invernizzi, Jessica Stebniki, Martín Tarallo, Alexis Magnone, Mauricio Castro, Luis E. Sosa and the Producción Gráfica 2D Team, Uruguay, South America, photos courtesy of Tali Kimelman. “This project was born in a class at the Public University of Uruguay, South America. 160 university students who work regularly with graphic arts and alternative processes embarked on a large cyanotype photograph, officially the largest made by contact printing. The photograph is one of the most recognized portraits of Anna Atkins, considered the first woman photographer in history, precursor of the photographic print on paper with her first books on British Algae (1843). This is a tribute to women photographers of all times and places. The original image was freely sourced from Wikipedia. The negative was digitally printed on PVC film in modules of 3 × 1 meters and glued with transparent adhesive tape to form a single negative that covers the entire surface. The cotton fabric has a surface of 5 × 7.5 meters (sewn as a single piece) and was sensitized with garden sprinklers. Once sensitized and dried, the negative was placed on the fabric and covered with black plastic held by the students. Then it was exposed for 20 minutes to winter sun at noon. The development was done in two kiddie pools with running water and a mild peroxide bath, and then dried in open shade. This great photograph will be hung in the Hall of the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism in Montevideo, Uruguay, and then travel to different places of cultural interest to honor Atkins’ legacy.” Dario Invernizzi is an instructor in the Visual Communication Design Degree of the University of the Republic (Montevideo). Check out the instagram account here: producciongrafica2d.