Christian Marclay, Meghann Riepenhoff, John Dugdale and Annie Lopez are among the contemporary artists who have made cyanotype their medium, following in the footsteps of Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil, who were already working with blue blueprint paper in 1949. A copying process designed to reproduce notes and plans has thus become, nearly two centuries later, a medium that artists choose for its own sake.
This page is about the artistic use of cyanotype today: who practises it, what these artists look for in it and how they use it. The history of cyanotype traces the long path that leads from the nineteenth-century laboratory to today's studios, and our general guide to cyanotype explains how it works if you are new to the process.
Cyanotype artists of the 20th and 21st centuries
The landmarks that follow all come from a museum or a university. They range from botany to clothing, by way of photography and landscape.
- Bertha E. Jaques (1863-1941), a recognised printmaker in Chicago, made cyanotypes of wild flowers and plants, which she laid on commercially made sensitive paper, mainly between 1906 and 1908. The Art Institute of Chicago holds her San Diego Seaweed (1908), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum credits her with more than a thousand botanical images.
- Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil worked together on blueprint paper from 1949: a model lay on the sheet, which was then exposed to a sunlamp. LIFE magazine featured them in its 9 April 1951 issue, and the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University reproduces one of the published photographs.
- John Dugdale (born 1960) lost much of his sight in 1993. Since then he has photographed with a 1912 Kodak view camera and printed his images as cyanotypes, a process simple enough for him to develop them himself. His Pink Lustre Tea, a cyanotype from 1994, is in the collection of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.
- Christian Marclay (born 1955) opens audio cassettes and spreads their tape over the sensitive paper. He printed these photograms at Graphicstudio, the University of South Florida's studio, and in 2009 the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired one of them, Memento (Soul II Soul), about 2.50 m long.
- Annie Lopez (born 1958), an artist from Phoenix, prints old photographs and texts in cyanotype on tamale wrapping paper. She then sews these prints into dresses, which the University of Arizona Museum of Art showed in 2024 in the exhibition Origin Story.
- Meghann Riepenhoff (born 1979) coats watercolour paper by hand, then entrusts it to the waves, sand, tide pools or rain, with no camera. In 2017 the Zillman Art Museum at the University of Maine exhibited one of her large pieces, twenty panels assembled over about three metres.
Bertha E. Jaques, Elderberry Blossoms, 1910, cyanotype photogram. Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1994.91.91. Public domain.
Why artists are returning to this process
From 16 January to 24 April 2016, the Worcester Art Museum presented the first major American exhibition tracing the history of cyanotype, in which works by contemporary artists sat alongside those of Anna Atkins. According to the museum, this return dates from the rise of digital photography in the 1990s: artists then turned to this traditional process, which allows both printing from a negative and making photograms.
The first attraction is the blue itself. Prussian blue forms under the light deep within the fibre, rich and stable, never quite the same from one print to the next. Hugh Scott-Douglas made it the subject of an abstract work from 2012, shown at Worcester, which explores the variations in colour caused by different exposure times in the sun.
The second attraction is the gesture: a coating spread with a brush, a wait in front of the sun, a rinse in water. This simplicity also has a practical side, since it is what allows John Dugdale to go on printing his photographs himself.
The third attraction is the imprint. The process records the direct contact of an object or of light, with no camera or lens. The Zillman Art Museum thus describes Meghann Riepenhoff's cyanotypes as direct imprints of the landscape, whose surface continues to change over time.
Cyanotype of a hut made by Éric Marais from a negative. The brushstrokes at the edges keep the mark of the gesture, and the blue has formed within the fibre of the paper.
The main uses in today's creative work
The Worcester Art Museum had built its exhibition around four themes: botany, landscape, abstraction and portraiture. These are the themes that dominated production in the early twentieth century, and they are found again in the work of today's artists.
The most widespread use is still the photogram, a camera-less image in which you place objects on the sensitive sheet before exposing it to light. Bertha Jaques laid plants on it, Christian Marclay cassette tapes: each object leaves its shadow in white on the blue. Plants hold a prominent place here.
The second use is printing from a negative, where a photographic image enlarged on a transparency is placed in contact with the coated paper. Photographers use it to give their shots the texture and blue of the process, where a conventional print would remain neutral.
The third use goes beyond flat paper. Annie Lopez sews her prints into dresses, Meghann Riepenhoff assembles her sheets into large compositions, and other artists coat fabric, wood or ceramics, sometimes with toning baths that change the colour of the original blue.
Photogram, print from a negative and textile support: three common uses of cyanotype today.
A founding figure who sheds light on today's practice
This artistic use is not a recent invention; it extends an old intuition. As early as 1843, the English botanist Anna Atkins laid algae directly on sensitive paper to keep their blue imprint, in a work often cited as the first book illustrated with photographs, her Photographs of British Algae.
Her approach, both documentary and of great visual beauty, foreshadows what many artists do again today in front of a plant or a piece of lace.
This link between a nineteenth-century pioneer and today's creative work says a great deal about the coherence of the process. Contemporary cyanotype takes from its technical origins as a copying method the principle of the imprint and the characteristic blue, and carries them towards a visual language in its own right. Over the course of its history, cyanotype has thus moved from a process for engineers and botanists to a medium for artists.
Anna Atkins, Dictyota dichotoma, c. 1853, cyanotype: the founding plate from which cyanotype artists still take their lead today. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005.100.557 (18). Public domain.
What this revival owes to the accessibility of the process
If cyanotype is making such a comeback, it is also because it remains one of the most straightforward historical photographic processes to carry out. Two iron salts, sunlight and clean water are enough, with no laboratory and no darkroom, which makes it accessible to a far wider public than silver-based processes.
This ease of entry partly explains its presence in workshops, art schools and demanding amateur practice. Its practitioners even have their own event, World Cyanotype Day: according to the organisers, it takes place every year on the last Saturday of September, when photographers and artists all over the world come together to make cyanotypes.
This openness takes nothing away from the depth of work that is possible; it simply widens the door. You can begin with a photogram of foliage one summer afternoon and end up with a controlled series, so readily does the process tolerate trial and error while rewarding patience.
To get started in practice and bring this blue to life under the light, our cyanotype kit brings together the two iron salts, the paper and what you need to succeed with your first prints.
The contents of the Sténoflex cyanotype kit: two bottles of iron salts, paper and pipettes. The sun and clean water do the rest.
Éric Marais — Photographer, author of two books on pinhole photography (published by Pearson) and creator of the Sténoflex. He has run introductory workshops in alternative photography, from pinhole to cyanotype, from the very beginning.