Cyanotype: When Light Draws in Blue

When you rinse the paper under running water, something extraordinary occurs. The areas that were hidden from the sun wash away in pale yellow streams, while everything the light touched remains: a deep, resonant blue that seems to hold the sky itself. It's the kind of blue that makes you understand why the Prussian chemists who first created this pigment in 1704 called it a miracle.

f 90

A Process Born from Curiosity

Cyanotype emerged in 1842, invented by Sir John Herschel—not as an art form, but as a way to reproduce notes and diagrams. He was searching for a method to copy botanical illustrations when he stumbled upon this light-sensitive process. But it was Anna Atkins, a botanist and close friend of Herschel's, who recognized the poetry in it.

In 1843, Atkins began creating the world's first book illustrated with photographs: Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. Page by page, she laid delicate seaweeds on treated paper and exposed them to light, creating ghostly white silhouettes against that distinctive blue. She wasn't just documenting plants—she was teaching us how to see them differently, how light and shadow could become a new language for observation.

Anna Atkins made over 400 cyanotype impressions of algae and ferns. In doing so, she became not only photography's first woman practitioner, but also its first poet.

The Chemistry of Blue Light

At its heart, cyanotype is a conversation between iron salts and sunlight. You coat paper with a solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide—chemicals that are sensitive to ultraviolet light. When you place objects or negatives on the treated surface and expose it to the sun, something remarkable happens: wherever light touches, the iron compounds transform, binding together into an insoluble blue pigment called Prussian blue.

The areas protected by your objects—a leaf's skeleton, a feather's edge, the translucent layers of a flower petal—remain unchanged, still soluble. When you wash the paper, these unexposed areas dissolve away, leaving behind the luminous negative space. What was shadow becomes light; what was light becomes this endless, oceanic blue.

It's a reversal, a kind of photographic negative that captures not the thing itself, but the absence of it—the silhouette, the ghost, the memory of form.

A Practice of Patience and Presence

In our accelerated world of instant images and digital immediacy, cyanotype asks you to slow down. You must prepare your chemicals, coat your paper, wait for it to dry in darkness. You must arrange your composition—whether it's pressed flowers, transparent fabrics, handmade negatives, or found objects—with intention, knowing that once the sun touches them, they're committed to memory.

Then comes the waiting. Depending on the strength of the sun, exposure can take anywhere from five to twenty minutes. You're not pressing a button and moving on; you're standing witness as light performs its slow transformation. The paper gradually shifts from pale yellow-green to a deeper bronze—a preview of the blue that's forming beneath the surface.

This is the meditative heart of cyanotype: the requirement to be present, to trust the process, to collaborate with the sun. You're not in full control, and that's the beauty of it. Clouds pass over, changing the light. Breezes shift your careful arrangements. The sun moves across the sky, creating gradients you never planned.

When you finally bring the paper inside and see the image emerge under running water—watching the blues deepen and the whites brighten—it feels like witnessing something being born. Because, in a sense, it is.

Why Make Cyanotypes Now?

Perhaps because we need reminders that making can be slow. That art doesn't always require electricity or screens or layers of software. That sometimes the most profound tools are light, water, and time.

Cyanotype connects us to the earliest days of photography, when the medium was still finding its language. There's something humbling about using the same process that Anna Atkins used in 1843, coating paper by hand, exposing it to the same sun. The technique hasn't changed because it doesn't need to—it's already perfect in its simplicity.

But it's also thoroughly contemporary. Artists today use cyanotype to explore memory and impermanence, to create installations that respond to specific landscapes, to print images on fabric, wood, ceramics. The process is endlessly experimental because every exposure is unique—affected by humidity, paper texture, the intensity of light, even the minerals in your water.

And there's the sheer sensory pleasure of it: the smell of the chemicals, the feel of the brush against paper, the cold rush of water over your hands as blues emerge like secrets being told. In an age of immaterial images, cyanotype reminds us that photographs can be touched, that they can exist as objects with weight and texture and a history you can trace with your fingers.

An Invitation to Begin

You don't need much to start. A simple kit of chemicals, some watercolor paper, a sunny afternoon. Gather what draws your eye—leaves from your garden, lace from your grandmother's drawer, objects whose shadows you want to preserve. Coat the paper with care, let it dry in the dark, then step into the light.

Place your objects on the treated surface like arranging a composition that only you and the sun will understand. Cover it with glass or acrylic to keep everything pressed close and still. Then wait. Watch the paper change. Notice how the shadows deepen. Feel how time moves differently when you're collaborating with light.

When the exposure feels right—and you'll develop an intuition for this—bring your paper inside and run it under water. Watch the magic happen. Watch the blues emerge like a sky after rain, like memory made visible, like proof that light leaves traces everywhere it touches.

Cyanotype teaches you that photography isn't just about capturing—it's about revealing what was always there, waiting in the space between light and shadow.

Curious about learning cyanotype? I teach the process—from preparing your chemicals to reading the light. Get in touch and let's make something blue together.