Cyanotype workshop

The wonderful thing about cyanotype is that it requires no special equipment to achieve great results; water, sunshine, 2 chemicals, and some paper or absorbent material can produce beautiful and interesting pieces of work.

HKOP use it in many of their outreach projects because they can pre-treat rolls of material, bag it up to prevent exposure, and then take it out onto the streets where participants can lie on it or place objects on it. The results can be seen after ten minutes or less - Ho Yin showed us examples he had made at Chueng Sha Wan residential plaza, of a cyan frieze created by the local residents, catching them in various contortions and poses. It looked really good and he said they really enjoyed making it because they could see the results of their participation straight afterwards.

Here’s some history and a brief overview: cyanotype (or sun printing) is one of the earliest photographic processes, developed by Fox Talbot and Daguerre in the 1840’s. It relies on the mixing of two inert chemical solutions to create a sensitised liquid that can be applied to any absorbent material and then exposed to a powerful UV source. Back in the day, the only source powerful enough to do this was the sun. Images are produced by protecting the sensitised medium with an object/objects, or contact negative. After exposure the unfixed chemical is washed away, giving a positive image in cyan blue, hence the name. The process was adopted and used by English botanist Anna Atkins in the late 19^th century, who wanted to find a way of preserving images of botanical specimens that she realised would not make the long journey home.

I really enjoyed this workshop, which unlike lithography or etching, is quite straightforward and yields pleasing results in ten/fifteen minutes or so. The images I created seem to be connected to the past and somehow transient, which seems apt. 

The Shatin panorama which I’ve shown here looks for all like an image taken twenty years ago or more, a snapshot in time - which it is. Who knows how it will look in another twenty? My photo, taken last Sunday, is already history.

I’ve already mused on the fragility of Tai O; an image caught in ferro-cyanate brush-marks seems to me in some ways equivalent to a place briefly fixed in time by factors of geography, history and economics…