"To name an object is to suppress three-fourths of the pleasure of the poem which is made to be divined bit by bit: to suggest it, there's the dream. It's perfect usage of the mystery which constitutes the symbols: To evoke, bit by bit, an object in order and to abstract from it a condition of soul by a series of abstractions." – Stéphane Mallarmé

While studying art in college, my pursuit of creative photography took an interesting turn when I was first introduced to the cyanotype. Shortly thereafter, I began working on a multifaceted portfolio of blue monochrome images. For me, the cyanotype's capacity for great delicacy in tonal gradation and its ability to give reality a strange otherworldly cast is unmatched.

My interest in the history of printmaking led me to the alternative photography movement back in 2015. Since then, I have worked to rehabilitate the cyanotype as an art medium. What initially drew me to printing in Prussian blue was how hands-on the process was. As I studied its history, chemistry, aesthetics, and practice, I began experimenting with my own cyanotypes. Using the natural tannins found in wine, coffee, tea, oak, and persimmon, I have become a big fan of altering the colors of my prints from deep blue to dark sepia, among other tones. I have sampled an extensive variety of media, including a series of prints made on handmade cotton, hemp, kozo, and abaca papers. My subject matter seeks to invite the viewer in, and to give form to these vague and mysterious feelings we have going on around us. By adding layers of drawings and collage, I try to create something that wasn't there before but is infused with lost moments.

As evidenced by its elevated role in the traditions of painting, there has been a great deal of speculation about the color blue by artists and philosophers throughout the ages. C J Jung wrote that blue stands for thinking because it is the color of the rarefied atmosphere; symbolic of the celestial hemisphere, standing for the vertical, height, and depth. In a religious context, Jolan de Jacobi thought that blue symbolized the loftiest sentiments: spiritual devotion, heavenly love, and innocence. In his work on symbols, J E Cirlot pointed out that it is the color we see least efficiently and that there is not one perception of blue, but many. Lüscher’s color categories list the affective aspects of dark blue as quiescence, tranquility, and affection, and claimed that prolonged contemplation of dark blue had calming physiological effects on the central nervous system, reducing blood pressure and lowering rates of pulse and respiration. According to the aesthetic theories of the Russian painter, Wassily Kandinksy, “the deeper its tone, the more intense and characteristic the effect. We feel a call to the infinite, a desire for purity and transcendence … the ultimate feeling it creates is one of rest. When it sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. It becomes an infinite engrossment in solemn moods. As it grows lighter it becomes more indifferent and affects us in a remote and neutral fashion, like a high cerulean sky.”

Blue pigments are very rare in the natural world. Even other rare occurrences of blue in nature prove often to be examples not of pigmentation, but of structural color or chromatic phenomena rather than chemistry as seen in some bird plumage, iridescent butterfly wings, opal, or oil slick on water; all of which are due, not to the absorption of light, but to optical interference effects. Ultramarine was once the finest and most costly of all the pigments. It was made by grinding up the gemstone lapis lazuli, which was mined only in Afghanistan, and therefore came from ‘over the sea’, hence ultra mare. In the early nineteenth century, artists celebrated the liberation of this color when a less expensive synthetic ultramarine became more widely available.

The prefix ‘cyano-‘ derives from the Greek root κυανεος, which translates as ‘dark blue’ and the suffix ‘-type’ comes from τυπος meaning ‘strike’, i.e. ‘print’. The first recorded observation of Prussian blue (ferric ferrocyanide) formed for a photographic purpose was made by Sir John Frederick William Herschel in his handwritten memoranda, experimental notes, and published scientific papers. His general diary entry for 23 April 1842 noted his discovery of the photographic property of the ammonio-citrate of iron. Just over three years after Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot had announced their independent inventions of photography in silver, the unexpected birth of the silverless cyanotype came literally out of the blue. It is worth noting that most 150-year-old cyanotypes have survived better than their silver counterparts of comparable age. Using the strongly dichromatic ferric processes, Herschel’s serendipitous discovery quickly matured into a spirit of calculated invention. In his writings, he described “the action of the spectrum is almost instantaneous, and most intense. A copious and richly colored deposit of Prussian blue is formed over the blue, violet and extra-spectral rays.”

Continuing in the work of his father, who pioneered the use of astronomical spectrophotometry, Herschel is described as one of the first professional astronomers and his modern mathematical approach to astronomy led him to discover infrared radiation. It was in fact Herschel who coined the word photography, which literally means "drawing with light", and he was the first to describe photographs as either positives or negatives. In addition, he took the first ever photo captured on a glass plate. His discovery of the cyanotype might have been the result of his efforts to find a more efficient way of copying his astronomical notes.

The chemical identity of Prussian blue is quite unusual in that it contains the element in two different states of oxidation: both as ‘ferric’ iron and ‘ferrous’ iron. The removal or absorption of red light from the spectrum is caused by electrons ‘hopping’ easily from the ferrous to the ferric iron. This mixed state of oxidation produces the intense deep-blue color.

The rebranded ‘ferroprussiate’ process found some use by photographers as an early option for proofing negatives, but its major market would be for the copying of plans in virtually every drawing office. The commercialized version of Herschel’s formula, which we now call the blueprint, was the first process for reprographic photocopying. With the advent of commercial blueprint paper, marketed by Marion and others, draughtsmen employed this extremely useful process for copying outline sketches and multiplying tracings, the characters or figures being produced in white upon a blue background. By the time the first commercial blueprint machine was introduced into the USA, the name Herschel had been totally eclipsed. The cyanotype held sway as the chief industrial reprographic process for 80 years, until the invention of electrophotography in the 1950’s enabled photocopying by entirely dry methods.

With the refinement of platinum printing by William Willis, the platinotype became the premier medium for fine-art photography. The cyanotype process developed by Herschel was not highly regarded by most photographers as a satisfactory pictorial medium. By inevitably rendering all that it touched in uncompromising blue, the cyanotype was felt to devalue the very color that artists had historically reserved to embody a sense of preciousness. In his 1889 Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art, Peter Henry Emerson claimed that “blue prints are only for plans, not for art … and no one but a vandal would print a landscape in red, or in cyanotype.”

It is not unusual for a process to remain in perdu for some years, only to be made well known again with some mystery and circumstance. Following Anna Atkins’ pioneering endeavors, the cyanotype process continued to be used for printing botanical photograms, but inevitably shifted over the years from the recording of plant taxonomy towards the making of works of art. A photogram is a cameraless image of the shadow cast by an object onto sensitized paper. If the object is at all translucent, it may modulate the transmitted light, and the photogram then ceases to be a mere silhouette but acquires some internal structure.

My work seeks to pay homage to the storied history of the cyanotype, though I enjoy coupling this 150-year-old technique with digital photography and printing. I thoroughly appreciate, and am continually delighted by the work of those who practice “re-inventing” alternative or historic photographic processes as a means of creative expression.

For more information, see Mike Ware’s Cyanomicon: History, Science and Art of Cyanotype: Photographic Printing and Prussian Blue. www.mikeware.co.uk