Today we went to the Grand Parade campus in town to do a workshop on cyanotypes. We learned that Anna Atkins, who was known as the first woman to ever publish a book with photographic images using cyanotypes. Her work really fascinates me because the plants she used to make the cyanotype images were very beautiful and we later learned the process, which interested me even more.
- First we each printed a chosen image that we previously made into negatives using Photoshop
- Next, we coated the paper with a chemical solution of ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanide away from sunlight and left it to dry in the dark room
- Then we placed the negatives onto the paper when it was ready and with a piece of glass we covered it. Next, we put them under the UV light for a few minutes until the paper turned bronze. The first time I put mine under the light for 6 minutes and the other 2 I did for 7 minutes. I like the 7 minute ones because the detail was just perfect in the end.
- The final step was to wash the images under cold water until it turned blue.
The British inventor of photography, William Henry Fox Talbot produced his first ‘photogenic drawings’ in 1834 and then made his first camera negative the following year.
In 1833, he began experimenting with the possibility of creating accurate images of the world through mechanical and chemical means. By 1835 he had produced his first camera negative, and soon realised that a positive image could subsequently be obtained by further printing. “With one image taken outside his front window in the Abbey’s South Gallery, his country house in Wiltshire, Fox talbot lay the foundations of British photography” states Eamon McCabe in the photography documentary Britain in Focus: A Photographic History (BBC Four, 2017). This shows us that photography has changed a lot over the years starting from Fox Talbot taking the first photo to John Herschel, making the first cyanotype and others inventing new processes which has lead to us taking digital photos today.
Toister (2019) quotes “Photography today is a changed art form. Partly because it is no longer an autonomous medium, it is certainly not a distinct one. In fact, photography is arguably better served if understood as media.” This also suggest that photography mediums have changed even though we still use these methods professionally and for fun in today’s world. This shows that photography is so old and it’s gone down in history all these years and become what we know as digital today.
References:
BBC Four (2017) Britain in Focus: A Photographic History. Available at: https://learningonscreen.ac.uk/ondemand/index.php/prog/0E7E5043?bcast=125108148 (Accessed 8th January 2020)
Toister, Y. 2019, “PHOTOGRAPHY: Love’s labour’s lost”, photographies, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 117-133.
