Artist's Process

Why so blue?

Madge Evers tells us about cyanotypes and their history.

The cyanotype is an alternative photographic process developed by Jon Herschel in 1842 that produces a cyan-blue print. Botanist Anna Atkins created cyanotype photogram images of plants and presented them in the first ever photographic book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, 1843.

The process uses the iron-based chemicals ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide to create a light-sensitive emulsion that is brushed onto paper. Once dry, the paper is exposed to ultraviolet light, where the emulsion reacts with light. The paper is then processed in water and the emulsion that has reacted with ultraviolet light turns blue. About this blue, Kristina Wilson suggests, in True Blue: Cyanotypes, the Index, and Truthfulness, her essay for Worcester Art Museum’s 2016 exhibition, Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period, which she co-curated with Nancy Kathryn Burns, that “apart from its factual dishonesty…The color blue resonates emotionally and in the body: blue can be bracing, or it can be soothing” (28).

Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. For much of this time, the cyanotype was considered a lesser form of photography. As Nancy Kathryn Burns noted in The Fraudulent Enlistment of the Cyanotype, her essay for WAM’s Cyanotypes: Photography’s Blue Period, “the cyanotype’s use as a primitive copier, not only its ease of use and hue, unnerved some critics enough to consider it an imposter within the field of photography” (18).

The cyanotype survived its dismissal and is alive and well. Current artists use cyanotype chemistry in many ways, including in camera-based work, in photograms, and as an interactive emulsion.

Worcester Magazine Feature

Sporeplay

by Brianna Giammasi, Clark University '19

This pamphlet is the product of a Fall 2017 seminar at Clark University, and is made possible through a grant from the Mellon Foundation to support partnerships between Clark University and Worcester organizations. Giammasi's essay appeared in Worcester Magazine in the fall of 2017.

IN PROCESS

"My work explores transformation. I create abstract works on paper using mushroom spores. To create a spore image, I place a mushroom, gill side down, on paper. After several hours, the mushroom releases any number of its many tiny spores and a powdery residue appears. Spores fly or float, then alight; familiar patterns emerge within the layers of spores. I also incorporate the cyanotype process into some of my imagery. Each spore print, a collaboration with a mushroom’s millions of spores, is unique and potentially fugitive; I often photograph the fragile results."

Bleeding Heart in process

The artist forms compositions using mushrooms and other plant materials

The mushrooms release their spores onto the dark paper

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE MUSHROOM LIFECYCLE

(Diagram by Jesse Evers)

Spores are germinated in a substrate such as compost, wood chips, or sawdust. The substrate becomes innoculated with spores. The spores germinate, and fruiting bodies develop. (You can purchase kits using pre-innoculated mycelium to grow your own at home.) The matured fruitbodies release their spores into the air in order to reproduce. Typically this sporulation process occurs in the wild, where the airborne spores innoculate at random. For Evers, the mushrooms are harvested prior to this step, and the spores are caught on dark paper to create spore prints, where shadowy forms are left behind.