My wife is Finnish and every summer we head out to Finland to the in-laws sea-side, forest surrounded, idyllic summer house. Away from the fully equipped London print studio I like to take the opportunity to experiment with more lo-fi techniques, and one of my favourites is cyanotype.
Cyanotype is an early photographic process, potassium ferricyanide and ferric ammonium are precisely mixed to create a solution which can be coated on paper to create a light sensitive basic photographic paper.
After my grandmother in law passed away two boxes of old plate glass negatives were found in the attic of her house. No one knows the date for sure but the best guess is somewhere between 1915-1925. The images are of her mother and father (my wife's great grand parents) and other relatives and they offer a fascinating snap shot of life in Finland 100+ years ago.
There are 24 plates in total and I attempted to print them as contact prints (the plate sitting directly on the treated paper) using sunlight to expose the prints. This was a hit and miss process and some of the plates were so over exposed I couldn't get an image from them. But some of them worked and worked really well.
Three plates sat on a piece of treated paper sat in the sun on the balcony.
I exposed the prints for between three and five minutes depending on the negative.
I exposed them three or four at time to speed up the process. Selecting negatives that had approximately the same level of exposure.
Below are some of the better prints, we've taken the negatives to be professionally scanned so I'm hopeful we'll be able to get even better images from the digital scans. But before then some retro printmaking seemed like an apt way to get the first glimpse of these in a long long time.
I think the outdoor shots are probably my favourites, but they're all interesting in their own right. I'm looking forward to seeing the digital scans and working on these images some more, but that's for next summer.
In the meantime here are some links about cyanotype, some contemporary artists who are using it and where to go if you want to give it a go yourself.
More info on cyanotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanotype
Beautiful dreamy prints from Craig Keenan https://craigkeenanart.com/
Stunning collages from Chloe McCarrick https://www.chloemccarrick.com/
Try it yourself with materials and step by step guides here https://parallaxphotographic.coop/product-category/processes/