Sir John Herschel was the scientific superstar of the 19th century.
Herschel is the man who could have invented photography
if he’d been bothered to.
He’s the one that Talbot goes to
to find out how to fix his images, permanently
and as Herschel is dabbling, he invents the cyanotype as well.
Sir John Herschel was an astronomer and scientist
working around the same time as Talbot in England.
Once he heard about the invention of photography
he decided to figure it out for himself
and he came up with the cyanotype process.
Herschel invented the process after Daguerre already announced his own process.
After Talbot announced his process.
Cyanotype is a very interesting process.
It’s a non-silver process.
Most of the photographic processes used
throughout the 19th and 20th century are silver based
Herschel comes up with a process that produces
a permanent blue and white image, based on the salts of iron
and while there are many variants of the process
essentially it’s two chemicals.
You take potassium ferrocyanide and ferric ammonium citrate
and when you combine these two chemicals
you produce a compound
that if you brush this on paper
and allow it to dry
you put them in contact with your negative
place them in the sun
it will turn color when it’s exposed to light.
And so it’s kind of a latent image process.
There are elements of printing out
because you actually see a printed out image on the paper.
But it really comes to life when you put the paper in just plain old water.
It turns bright blue.
It doesn’t get much use in the 1840’s
with the exception of maybe botanicals.
It was utilized very early on by a British woman
who was the daughter of a friend of Herschel’s
named Anna Atkins.
She was doing a record of botanicals that were placed on this paper
as a way of keeping a record without having to draw.
She then published several series of books
of botanical specimens.
And those are really the first photographically illustrated publications.
It gives you this really rich blue intense color.
It sort of takes it out of the venacular.
It takes it out of everyday life and makes us look at it a little differently.
Cyanotype is invented by Herschel in the very beginning of photography
but really doesn’t see any use until the end of the 19th century.
It started being used in engineering applications.
It became what we know know as the blueprint.
The blueprint really found its way into the 21st century.
The other way of using the cyanotype process
was to make very cheap photographs
from gelatin silver negatives.
It was utilized by many photographers to do test prints
or contact sheets as a proofing material.
The most common cyanotype you’ll find
are the images that are made by college students in the 1880-1890’s.
Most of the cyanotypes we see in collections tend to be done by amateurs.