I've always had a curiosity with Cyanotypes. ‘Undecided’ is my overriding emotion. Never fully taken seriously by all photographers or artist-printmakers by its association with children’s educational school experiments. The traditional cyanotype isn’t a particularly good process for capturing wide tonality and detail that fine art photographers crave. Above all that, it’s bloody blue! That carries quite a weighty emotional response, a melancholic headiness difficult to pinpoint.
Cyanotypes have come along a little in the last decade or so. Minor tweaks, total reformulations and some serious artists such as John Dugdale have raised their credibility. The “New Cyanotype” process has been around a while, invented by the brilliant Mike Ware. It has a reputation of being finicky, hasn’t really gained great traction but gives Cyanotypes a printmaking refinement closer to Platinum. Its deep blues also don’t wash off during processing to such a heartbreaking degree as the traditional process.
My best advice for those wanting to get into analogue is: Don’t dabble. Just do It. Commit to it, inevitably that means dedicating yourself to the process for a few months if not years. Making a few prints over a weekend makes me a Cyanotypist not. I often see on photography forums, somebody has just announced they’ve purchased a film camera, they are going to "incorporate it into their digital workflow".
Apologies in advance, I am now in rant mode. We, probably, are amateurs. We don’t need results. We do photography as a passion, it’s the doing, the journey we go on. If some photographers played golf, they might as well just pick a golf ball, walk up to the hole and just put the fucking ball down it. Just take only the sodding film camera to your photoshoot. What’s the worst that could happen?, Conde Nast phone you asking when they can get your raw files of the shoot with Tina and you have to explain you didn’t bring a digital camera, relied on film, then accidentally mixed fixer and dev up.
Anyway, Cyanotypes. I’ve decided to stick with them for a while. Maybe I commit to a “Year of Cyanotypes”. From experience that means 6 months before I get bored. There’s a few strategic benefits to this plan. Firstly now I’ve committed to being a printer and not a “monitor screen’ist” media sharing person; I need to keep pushing my printmaking abilities. Whilst there is still infinite levels of further ability to be had from standard darkroom enlarger printing, getting into more artisan printing methods does give a subtle but noticeable shift in mindset.
In the not so distant past, photographs where not viewed on monitors. RC (Resin coated photographic paper) prints where probably the equivalent of our monitors photograph viewing experiences . Glossy, high fidelity, all too perfect representation. When you see RC prints you imagine they where created by a printing machine. A captured screen of reality. FB (Fibre based paper) seem to just have a smidge more feeling of the hand of the operator. Whilst a family portrait scene might feel more appropriate for an RC print, FB prints feel more suited to a subject of refined tonality and detail. More artisan techniques like Platinum and Cyanotype go a bit further, more abstracted again and I get a shift in thinking, not looking for photographs but instead in terms of looking for images that will create good “prints”.
I want to reduce creating RC prints from my process, making Cyanotypes gets me more accustomed in print washing, the patience rather than the technicalities. Unusually for an alternative printing process Cyanotypes are easy to wash, but do need some consideration. RC does not need any thought other than a 5 minute wash.
Last week I didn’t have any blog post, I was busy loosing my shit trying to get the New Cyanotype process to work. Its finicky with paper, however I had underestimated just how finicky it was to become. Luckily I had Arches Platine paper, a very expensive paper about guaranteed to work with any alternative process and conveniently confirmed to work with the New Cyanotype process. It didn’t.
Faced with this issue it would be fair to conclude my technique was wrong. There was also another wildcard, I’d bought pre-mixed New Cyanotype bottle from Fotospeed. I ordered another bottle to confirm mine hadn’t been fucked up by shelf life issues or by myself accidentally sucking it out the bottle with a contaminated syringe. Bottle #2 also exhibited fogging, this is where unexposed areas of coated paper turned blue instead of being crisp white highlights.
I found the fogging could be almost eliminated by exposing the paper before the cyanotype formula had fully dried, but this has all kinds of secondary issues. As long as the solution sits on the paper, it’s accumulating more fog. After some research I read that by adding 1 drop of 40% citric acid into your coating mix, (never the bottle as it will contaminate the formula over time) the fog can be reduced further. That helped but not eliminated the issue. My next plan was to mix New Cyanotype myself but one chemical puts me off; Potassium Dichromate. Hard to find, except for some dubiously scammy looking websites, it’s generally a restricted chemical, sometimes affectionately nicknamed “cancer” luckily it’s only a preservative and not essential, but some people claim it does help with contrast and fogging. Which could result in me making a dichromate free solution equally as bad or worse.
By chance I noticed Fotospeed was selling a kit as well as the formula bottle, the kit now contained Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag paper, before it contained a Fabriano paper that fogged like a motherfucker. Fotospeed must of realised their own kit didn’t work and swapped things around. After ordering Hahnemuhle paper, the Cyanotypes finally work on Friday at about 1am, after pissing around every evening after work.
My suspicion is that either my Arches Platine paper is a bad stock, Or the Fotospeed formula isn’t quite perfect. My experience with alternative printing chemistry is that the UK is not great for ordering chemicals, in the US they have a much stricter classification and purity standards combined with looser distribution laws. Fotospeed themselves, an amoeba to any reputable chemical supplier, would probably have issues getting absolutely pure chemistry from a big supplier. I feel something is slightly off in this mix, making this somewhat rogue, paper finicky process, even worse. Luckily Hahnemuhle Platinum Rag is ‘God level’ pure paper with almost nothing in its fibres to react badly to the New Cyanotype formula.
Irritatingly, the most sensible way to make Cyanotypes is from a (disgusted face) digital image. Firstly Cyanotypes are a contact printing process. You coat the paper with chemistry in the dark. Wait for the solution to dry. Place a negative on-top and expose to light. If you want a 10x8 inch image, which is still fairly small, I’d need a whopping massive 10x8 camera and horrendously expensive film. Secondly, negatives for Cyanotypes need a different density level than ones for darkroom paper, you would need to tailor the film, exposure and development to a Cyanotype exclusively.
More sensible is to scan your negatives, buy a bloody expensive QTR compatible Epson large format printer and hundreds of pounds on ink, read a few books on digital negatives with the Quadtone RIP system and then print your own negatives on transparency film tailored to whatever process you want. It is a technically challenging post for another day, but a hell of a lot more convenient than going down the massive camera route. I’d also want the Chamonix 10x8 camera which is 4k, so it’s stilll a cheaper route. There is another possibility of analogue “internegatives” but if patience had a price, that could prove to cost millions.
So here’s to 2025, my year of Cyanotypes. I would also like to announce I am considering adding a digital camera to my Film photography workflow.
