cy·an·o·type

A photographic print in white on a bright blue background made usually on paper or cloth sensitized with potassium ferricyanide and a ferric salt, developed after exposure by washing in plain water; see also blueprint.

 

The information on this page is excerpted with generous permission from Christopher James’ book "The Book of Alternative Photographic Processes" - www.ChristopherJames-Studio.com

A Little History

The cyanotype was the first simple and successfully realized practical non-silver iron process. Discovered by Sir John Herschel (1792-1871) in 1842, a mere three years after the “official” announcement of the discovery of photography, the cyanotype provided permanent images in an elegant assortment of blue values. Herschel is the same gentleman who coined the words positive and negative, photograph and snapshot. He is also credited in 1819, with discovering that a solution of sodium thiosulfate (which he referred to as hyposulfite of soda) has the ability to dissolve silver chloride and what that particular chemical’s role might be in permanently fixing a photographic image. This is an important bit of information that he passed along to Talbot. Curiously, Herschel did not officially announce this particular finding until 1839.

Anna Atkins: The First Woman Photographer

Anna Atkins (1799-1871) was the first woman photographer. Referred to sparingly by traditional photo historians, she made beautiful cyanotype images of algae, ferns, feathers, and waterweeds. Her botanist father, John George Children, and Sir John Herschel were friends, and the Atkins and Herschel families resided only 30 miles apart in Kent, England. Children was a member of the Royal Society, and when his friend Herschel announced his discovery of the cyanotype (1842), Children quickly passed the news on to his daughter Anna. Although there is no conclusive evidence that Herschel was Atkins' mentor, it is more than probable that she learned the cyanotype process in the Herschel household.

Anna Atkins made thirteen known versions of her work entitled British Algea: Cyanotype Impressions (1843-1853). In October 1843, Atkins began issuing published folios of her photogenic (photogram) drawings. In 1850, she began to publish more comprehensive collections of her work, completing a three volume anthology in 1853. These books, containing hundreds of handmade images, were the very first published works to utilize a photographic system for purposes of scientific investigation and illustration. Significantly, they were initiated and created prior to Talbot’s Pencil of Nature (1844-1846), a published work that is generally given credit by historians as the first to have achieved this important milestone.